This story has been updated. For a second time, the Trump administration ordered a halt in construction of the nearly-completed Revolution Wind project on Monday, this time as part of a larger offensive against five offshore wind farms along the East Coast.  In an announcement Monday, the In terior Department said it was pausing federal leases for the five offshore projects, effective immediately. The agency said the pause would give its officials, along with the Department of Defense, more time to evaluate national security concerns and work with developers to come up with potential solutions.  “The prime duty of the United States government is to protect the American people,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement explaining the decision. “Today’s action addresses emerging national security risks, including the rapid evolution of the relevant adversary technologies, and the vulnerabilities created by large-scale offshore wind projects with proximity near our east coast population centers.” In addition to Revolution Wind, the four other impacted projects are Massachusetts Vineyard Wind, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind and two projects in New York, Sunrise Wind and Empire Wind. The action marks the second time this year that the Trump administration has brought work on Revolution Wind to a standstill.  The multibillion-dollar project is a collaboration between Danish energy company Ørsted and Skyborn Renewables. A spokesperson for the developers did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday. In August, the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management issued a stop-work order that cited similar national security concerns. The project’s developers sued along with the states of Connecticut and Rhode Island, and eventually obtained an injunction from U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth, which allowed construction to resume.  In a statement Monday morning, Attorney General William Tong called the administration’s latest action a “brazen” and “lawless” attempt to circumvent that ruling. “The project has been vetted and approved through every layer of federal and state regulatory process, including a careful review of the issues raised in this announcement,” Tong said. “Every day this project is stalled is another day of lost work, another day of unaffordable energy costs, and other day burning fossil fuels when American-made clean energy is within reach.” The attorney general added that his office is “evaluating all legal options.” Kate Sinding Daly, senior vice president for law and policy at Conservation Law Foundation, said in an emailed statement that the action, “is a desperate rerun of the Trump administration’s failed attempt to kill offshore wind — an effort the courts have already rejected.” Federal officials said Monday that unclassified reports from the U.S. government have long found that the movement of massive turbine blades and the highly reflective towers create radar interference called “clutter.” The clutter caused by offshore wind projects obscures legitimate moving targets and generates false targets in the vicinity of wind projects, the Interior Department said. An Interior spokesman on Monday did not immediately respond to a request to provide the reports cited as rationale for the agency’s decision.  President Donald Trump is a vocal critic of wind energy and has repeatedly made false and misleading claims about the impact turbines have on birds, whales and even diagnoses of cancer among humans.  On his first day in office, Trump issued a moratorium on new offshore wind leases and ordered the Department of Interior to review its existing leases. In an interview with Fox Business on Monday, Secretary Burgum said that his office and defense officials had completed that task and determined that offshore turbines create “genuine risk for the U.S., particularly related to where they are in proximity to our East Coast population centers.” Supporters of offshore wind projects, meanwhile, have cast doubt on the government’s claims. Elizabeth Klein, who served as the final Biden administration director of BOEM, told the Connecticut Mirror earlier this year said that potential national security concerns were reviewed by several departments throughout every stage of the offshore wind process, beginning with the basic identification of offshore areas that might be suitable for leasing. “All of those things are considered throughout the process, starting with where these sales first take place,” Klein said. “This is arbitrary and capricious decision-making. There’s no evidence that there’s something new or unusual or that had not been considered.” Judge Lamberth, the Reagan appointee who ordered work to resume on Revolution Wind in September, also said in his ruling that the federal government had failed to provide evidence supporting its claims.  U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2nd District, released a statement Monday pointing out that both Congress and the Department of Defense have rejected claims that offshore wind projects negatively impact national security.  “The Trump Administration promised to cut energy prices in half,” Courtney said. “We know that President Trump has a longstanding personal vendetta against offshore wind. Pausing these projects without any real justification will do nothing but increase costs for rate payers and eliminate good paying jobs for the building trades.” Much of the work on Revolution Wind is taking place at the State Pier in New London. There, more than 100 workers are assigned to the project’s staging area offloading massive turbine blades and tower components and then hoisting the parts onto specially-designed ships to be taken out to the assembly area off the coast of Block Island.  Offshore construction is already 85% completed, according to the developers. In earlier filings with the court, Ørsted officials said the previous stop-work order cost the project more than $2 million a day and that cancelling it altogether would incur over $1 billion in additional costs. (Sunrise Wind, another one of Ørsted’s projects targeted in Monday’s announcement, is also being staged at the State Pier.) If completed, Revolution Wind would supply enough electricity to the New England electric grid to power roughly 350,000 homes. The cost of that electricity is to be supported by power purchase agreements with utility customers in Connecticut and Rhode Island.  Keith Brothers, the president of the Connecticut Building and Construction Trades Council, said he was monitoring the situation at the State Pier but was not aware of any immediate layoffs of unionized workers as a result of Monday’s actions. “We would hate to see the members get a Christmas gift like that, you lose your job,” Brothers said. “This isn’t the time of the year to do that.”  In addition to the 1,200 jobs directly supported by the project, Brothers said the offshore wind industry employs thousands of longshoremen as well as crews building turbine-installation vessels at a shipyard in Texas.  “It’s kind of a domino effect, when you stop one thing, you’re stopping four or five different industries,” Brothers said. “This thing is rolling. You don’t stop a building when it’s halfway to three quarters of the way done. You keep going, right?” CT Mirror reporter Jan Ellen Spiegel and the Associated Press contributed to this article. ...read more read less