The Pentagon Froze Reviews of 125 Wind Projects Over Radar. A Trump-Appointed Judge Ordered It to Start Again.

A federal judge has ordered the Defense Department to resume the reviews that determine whether proposed wind farms interfere with military radar and flight operations, ruling that the Pentagon violated its own binding deadlines when it simply stopped doing them.

U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut, who sits in Oregon and was appointed by President Donald Trump, issued a preliminary injunction Thursday siding with renewable-energy trade associations, wind developers and environmental groups that had sued over the freeze. She found the plaintiffs likely to succeed on the merits and ordered the department to report back to the court every 30 days on whether reviews have actually restarted while the underlying case proceeds.

The review at issue is a required step, not an optional one. Before a utility-scale wind project can be built, the Defense Department evaluates whether spinning turbine blades will degrade military radar coverage, obstruct low-altitude training routes or interfere with test ranges. Federal regulations impose deadlines on that evaluation precisely because developers cannot finance, permit or begin construction until it clears. When the department stopped issuing determinations, projects did not get denied — they got suspended indefinitely, which for a capital-intensive project can be functionally identical to a denial.

At least 125 utility-scale wind projects across 25 states have been stuck because of the freeze. The American Clean Power Association has estimated that the stalled reviews put roughly $50 billion in investment and about 150,000 jobs at risk. The freeze traces back to August 2025.

The Pentagon's stated rationale was Doppler interference — the way rotating turbine blades can generate returns on radar that resemble aircraft or weather, complicating the picture for air defense operators. Government lawyers pointed to drone warfare in Ukraine and in the conflict with Iran as reasons to reexamine how wind installations affect domestic radar. Radar clutter from turbines is a genuine and long-studied engineering problem, and the department has historically resolved it project by project through mitigation agreements, relocations and software filtering rather than by halting reviews wholesale.

Immergut was unpersuaded that the department was actually still working. During a hearing, government attorneys asserted that reviews had resumed but could not identify any specific project currently moving through the process. Her order concluded that the department had violated its regulatory deadlines and that the harm to developers was concrete and ongoing.

The ruling is a setback for an administration that has been unusually direct about its hostility to wind power. Trump has repeatedly disparaged wind turbines, his administration blocked a large tranche of wind farm projects last year on national security grounds, and the government paid roughly $1 billion to a French energy company to abandon U.S. offshore wind leases. Two of the judges who have now ruled against major pieces of that agenda — Immergut here, and Judge James Wesley Hendrix in an unrelated firearms case this week — are Trump appointees.

The injunction is preliminary, meaning it preserves the status quo while the litigation continues rather than finally resolving whether the freeze was lawful. The Justice Department is expected to appeal.