Meanwhile, I want to turn to another piece of critical reporting you've been doing, tracking

the money around the Trump administration.

New reporting that energy companies are set to get nearly a billion dollars to not build offshore

wind farms.

I know the president has been critical of these projects in the past, but why that payout?

Several large-scale wind energy projects on the east and west coast of the U.S.

have been canceled in the last few months.

In March, the administration announced a nearly $1 billion payout to Total Energy,

which is a French company, to abandon an offshore wind project.

They had bought two leases in 2022, one off the coast of North

Carolina. That was for more than $133 million, and then another off the coast of New York for $795 million.

And then last week, more than $900 million and additional payouts were made for two more

projects, Blue Point Wind off of the coast of New York and New Jersey, and Golden State Wind off of the coast of California.

So between the last few months, there have been nearly $2 billion in these payments.

The administration had initially tried to block some of these wind projects from going forward, citing national security concerns.

That was batted down in several different courts.

And the Interior Secretary Doug Bergam told the Associated Press that these projects were only viable

when they were propped up by taxpayer subsidies under the Biden administration.

We reached out to the Department of Interior to ask about this.

We did not hear back from them in time. Nearly $2 billion in payments, though. Does the administration have the

spending authority to do that? There are serious questions about the legality of this. I spoke with

Liz Klein earlier today. She was the former director under President Biden of the Bureau of

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