In July, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dramatically, but quietly, scaled back a food safety surveillance system, cutting active tracking from eight top foodborne infections down to just two, according to a report by NBC News.

The Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet)—a network of surveillance sites that spans 10 states and covers about 54 million Americans (16 percent of the US population)—previously included active monitoring for eight infections from pathogens. Those include Campylobacter, Cyclospora, Listeria, Salmonella, Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC), Shigella, Vibrio, and Yersinia.

Now the network is only monitoring for STEC and Salmonella.

A list of talking points the CDC sent the Connecticut health department (which is part of FoodNet) suggested that a lack of funding is behind the scaleback. "Funding has not kept pace with the resources required to maintain the continuation of FoodNet surveillance for all eight pathogens," the CDC document said, according to NBC. The Trump administration has made brutal cuts to federal agencies, including the CDC, which has lost hundreds of employees this year.

A CDC spokesperson told the outlet that "Although FoodNet will narrow its focus to Salmonella and STEC, it will maintain both its infrastructure and the quality it has come to represent. Narrowing FoodNet’s reporting requirements and associated activities will allow FoodNet staff to prioritize core activities."

The CDC does maintain other surveillance systems that can collect data on infections, including the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System. And the CDC’s Listeria Initiative. However, these systems are for passive monitoring, while FoodNet was the only active system that sought case identification.

Food safety experts fear that the cuts will make it difficult for the CDC to monitor trends and quickly identify when cases increase at the outset of an outbreak. They also fear that weakening surveillance data will lead to less awareness of foodborne threats, and thus, less perceived need for food safety regulations.

"If you want to make foodborne disease go away, then don’t look for foodborne disease," J. Glenn Morris, director of the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida told NBC News. "And then you can cheerfully eliminate all of your foodborne disease regulations. My concern is that that is the path down which we appear to be heading."

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Just weeks after being confirmed by the Senate, Susan Monarez has been ousted from the now thoroughly battered public health agency.

The news was first reported by The Washington Post, which cited multiple officials within the Trump administration. After Ars Technica contacted the Department of Health and Human Services for confirmation of the ouster, HHS responded with a link to a post on the department's X account. The post states:

Susan Monarez is no longer director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We thank her for her dedicated service to the American people. @SecKennedy has full confidence in his team at @CDCgov who will continue to be vigilant in protecting Americans against infectious diseases at home and abroad.

The department did not address the circumstances surrounding Monarez's ouster. But The Washington Post reported this evening that US Health Secretary and fervent anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had pressed Monarez on her willingness to rescind approvals for COVID-19 vaccines for days. Monarez reportedly met with Kennedy and other officials Monday and declined to agree to changes without consulting vaccine advisors. Kennedy then urged her to resign for "not supporting President Trump’s agenda."

Monarez refused to resign and instead contacted Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who cast a critical vote in Kennedy's Senate confirmation after obtaining certain assurances from the anti-vaccine advocate. Cassidy then pushed back on Kennedy, who in turn became angry and lambasted Monarez. Administration officials then told Monarez to resign or be fired.

In a statement on social media this evening, lawyers Mark Zaid and Abbe Lowell said that they are representing Monarez and that she has neither resigned nor been notified by the White House of her termination. She continues to refuse to resign. The statement says that her ouster came about after she "refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts[.] she chose protecting the public over serving a political agenda."

Ars Technica has reached out to Zaid and will update this story with any additional information.

How it started

Monarez was confirmed by the Senate at the end of July in a 51–47 vote along party lines. She was the first nominee for CDC director that was required to go through Senate confirmation following a law mandating it in 2022.

Kennedy swore Monarez into the role on July 31, saying in a statement, "Dr. Monarez is a public health expert with unimpeachable scientific credentials. I have full confidence in her ability to restore the CDC’s role as the most trusted authority in public health and to strengthen our nation's readiness to confront infectious diseases and biosecurity threats."

Monarez has a PhD in microbiology and immunology and previously served as the deputy director for the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) under the Biden administration. She also previously held leadership and advisory roles with Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) at HHS, the Department of Homeland Security, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the National Security Council.

Trusted official

As Ars has reported previously, Monarez quietly helmed the CDC as acting director from January to March of this year but stepped down as required when Donald Trump nominated her for the permanent role. She was Trump's second nominee for the role, with the first being Dave Weldon, whose nomination was abandoned over concerns about his anti-vaccine views.

Monarez offered a welcome contrast, as her views generally align with the evidence-based public health community, and she has earned support from experts in the field. Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health, told NPR at the time of her confirmation that Monarez is "a loyal, hardworking civil servant who leads with evidence and pragmatism and has been dedicated to improving the health of Americans for the entirety of her career."

Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, told the outlet that Monarez "values science, is a solid researcher, and has a history of being a good manager. We're looking forward to working with her."

A low point for the agency

The reported ouster comes at what feels like a nadir for the CDC. The agency has lost hundreds of staff from layoffs and buyouts. Vital health programs have been shuttered or hampered. Dangerous rhetoric and health misinformation from Kennedy and other health officials in the Trump administration have made once-respected CDC experts feel vilified by the public and targets of hate. Kennedy himself has falsely called the COVID-19 shots the "deadliest vaccine ever made" and the CDC a "cesspool of corruption," for example.

On August 8, a gunman warped by vaccine disinformation opened fire on the CDC campus. Of nearly 500 shots fired, about 200 struck six CDC buildings as terrified staff dove for safety. One local police officer was killed in the incident. The gunman had specifically targeted the CDC for the shooting and blamed COVID-19 vaccines for his health problems.

Additional exits reported

After news broke of Monarez's removal, Stat News reported that a wave of CDC leadership has resigned. The high ranking resignations include: Daniel Jernigan, director of the National Center for Emerging Zoonotic Infectious Diseases; Deb Houry, Chief Medical Officer; and Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

"I am not able to serve in this role any longer because of the ongoing weaponization of public health," Daskalakis said in a message to staff seen by Stat.

"I am committed to protecting the public’s health, but the ongoing changes prevent me from continuing in my job as a leader of the agency," Houry wrote in message to staff. Houry added that science should "never be censored or subject to political interpretations."

Earlier today, Politico reported that Jennifer Layden, director of the agency’s Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance, and Technology, has also resigned.

This post has been updated to include the social media post from HHS, reporting from the Washington Post on the circumstances around Monarez's exit, additional resignations reported by Stat and Politico, and the statement from Monarez's lawyers.

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On Tuesday, the US Energy Information Agency released its latest data on how the US generated electricity during the first six months of 2025. The data suggests the notable surge in power use is flattening out a bit compared to earlier in the year, with the growth in coal use falling along with it. And despite the best efforts of the Trump Administration, the boom in solar power continues, with solar looking poised to pass hydroelectric before the year is out.

Growing, but moderating

For the last few decades, the US has largely seen its use of electricity remain flat. That's changed over the last year or so, with energy use ramping up, likely due in part to increased data center use. Earlier in the year, data indicated that demand for electricity was up roughly five percent year-over-year. But that seems to be tailing off over the course of the spring, leaving total electricity demand up by three percent for the January-through-June period.

The somewhat lower demand has had a positive effect on coal use. Earlier this year, coal was up by about 20 percent compared to the same period the year before. Now, it's only up by a bit under 17 percent. That's still terrible given coal's environmental and health impacts, not to mention its cost. But it's not as bad as it has been, and it could have been even better had the Trump Administration not forced a coal plant that was slated for closure to stay open.

The other big percentage change is in solar power, which has continued its sharp rise, with a gain of nearly 40 percent. Solar is expected to account for the majority of new generating capacity set to be installed this year.

Compared to a year earlier, the only big changes are coal and solar. Credit: John Timmer

In terms of actual Terawatt-hours produced, the increase in solar power (about 40 TW-hr) was close to offsetting the increase in coal generation (50 TW-hr). The other big change was in natural gas, which dropped by 32 TW-hr compared to the same period the year before. But because natural gas is the largest single source of electrical generation in the US, that amounts to just a 3.7 percent change year-over-year.

Where does that leave the grid? Despite the slight decline, natural gas continues its dominance, fueling 39 percent of the power placed on the grid during the first half of 2025. Nuclear follows at 18 percent, with coal at 17. The renewables in order are wind (12 percent), solar (7 percent), and hydro (6 percent). (Numbers may not add up to 100 percent due to rounding and the fact that a number of energy sources are at under one percent and not included here.)

Renewables booming

Those last numbers could be significant, as hydroelectric generation tends to peak in the spring during the snow melt. In contrast, with additional solar plants coming online over the course of the year, there's a good chance that in 2025, grid-scale solar will end up producing more electricity than hydroelectric plants for the first time. That's especially notable because hydroelectric generation is largely the same as it was the year prior, indicating that it is being passed due to the growth in solar alone.

Collectively, the three renewables have provided 25 percent of the US's electricity over the first half of the year. That means renewables are now second only to natural gas. If you add in nuclear power to get a sense of the emissions-free generation, we're now up to 43 percent of the electricity produced.

The one thing missing from this analysis is non-utility solar—the rooftop generation that is found on residential and commercial buildings, as well as some of the small-scale community solar. The EIA doesn't directly track its production, partly because a lot of it is used where it's produced and never ends up on the grid, instead showing up simply as lower demand. It does, however, estimate its production, with it rising by about 11 percent or five TW-hr year-over-year.

We also did a couple of additional analyses using these estimates under the assumption that 100 percent of this power didn't end up on the grid and thus displaced demand. The five TW-hr change compares to an increase in consumption of about 62 TW-hr overall. That means demand would have risen by about seven percent more if this solar hadn't been in production.

If we added the total small-scale solar generation to the total demand for the first half of 2025, none of the other sources of electricity saw their percentages change much—all of them dropped, but by less than a percentage point. But combining the small- and grid-scale solar into a single total shifted its production enough to cover nearly 9 percent of the total demand.

A hazy future

The striking thing about the first half of 2025 is that coal has played such a large role in meeting demand, despite the fact that it is the least efficient, most expensive way to generate electricity in the US unless you're willing to build a brand-new nuclear plant. Natural gas is considerably cheaper (which is how it came to be the dominant fuel), so if the demand could be met by quickly bringing new gas capacity online, it probably would. Yet natural gas use is actually down, suggesting that a lot of the growth in renewables has simply displaced it.

For the rest of the year, the EIA expects that most of the newly installed capacity will be either solar or batteries, the latter of which will undoubtedly end up storing some of that solar. Those projects were already in the pipeline before Trump returned to office, so it's unlikely that anything will change there unless the administration starts to try to block ongoing projects, as it has with offshore wind.

Looking further out, though, the situation becomes uncertain. The administration is planning to block any renewable projects on public lands, and Trump has made some of the same false statements about solar that he has about wind power. Eventually, the administration will face a choice between embracing its ideological commitment to fossil fuels and the reality that there aren't alternatives that can scale as fast as solar right now. Rising demand without new capacity to feed it will increase the use of expensive, inefficient generators.

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Entry-level workers in AI-exposed occupations have seen employment drop 13% since late 2022, according to Stanford University research analyzing millions of payroll records. The decline affects software developers, customer service representatives, and administrative assistants aged 22 to 25, while employment for older workers in the same roles continued growing. The study [PDF], based on ADP payroll data covering tens of thousands of firms, found the steepest drops in occupations where AI automates tasks rather than augments human capabilities. Among software developers aged 22-25, employment fell nearly 20% from its late 2022 peak. Workers in less AI-exposed fields like nursing saw employment growth across all age groups. The research controlled for firm-level effects and other economic factors, isolating AI's impact from broader trends like interest rate changes and pandemic-era hiring patterns.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The cybersecurity community on Reddit responded in disbelief this month when a self-described Air National Guard member with top secret security clearance began questioning the arrangement they’d made with company called DSLRoot, which was paying $250 a month to plug a pair of laptops into the Redditor’s high-speed Internet connection in the United States. This post examines the history and provenance of DSLRoot, one of the oldest “residential proxy” networks with origins in Russia and Eastern Europe.

The query about DSLRoot came from a Reddit user “Sacapoopie,” who did not respond to questions. This user has since deleted the original question from their post, although some of their replies to other Reddit cybersecurity enthusiasts remain in the thread. The original post was indexed here by archive.is, and it began with a question:

“I have been getting paid 250$ a month by a residential IP network provider named DSL root to host devices in my home,” Sacapoopie wrote. “They are on a separate network than what we use for personal use. They have dedicated DSL connections (one per host) to the ISP that provides the DSL coverage. My family used Starlink. Is this stupid for me to do? They just sit there and I get paid for it. The company pays the internet bill too.”

Many Redditors said they assumed Sacapoopie’s post was a joke, and that nobody with a cybersecurity background and top-secret (TS/SCI) clearance would agree to let some shady residential proxy company introduce hardware into their network. Other readers pointed to a slew of posts from Sacapoopie in the Cybersecurity subreddit over the past two years about their work on cybersecurity for the Air National Guard.

When pressed for more details by fellow Redditors, Sacapoopie described the equipment supplied by DSLRoot as “just two laptops hardwired into a modem, which then goes to a dsl port in the wall.”

“When I open the computer, it looks like [they] have some sort of custom application that runs and spawns several cmd prompts,” the Redditor explained. “All I can infer from what I see in them is they are making connections.”

When asked how they became acquainted with DSLRoot, Sacapoopie told another user they discovered the company and reached out after viewing an advertisement on a social media platform.

“This was probably 5-6 years ago,” Sacapoopie wrote. “Since then I just communicate with a technician from that company and I help trouble shoot connectivity issues when they arise.”

Reached for comment, DSLRoot said its brand has been unfairly maligned thanks to that Reddit discussion. The unsigned email said DSLRoot is fully transparent about its goals and operations, adding that it operates under full consent from its “regional agents,” the company’s term for U.S. residents like Sacapoopie.

“As although we support honest journalism, we’re against of all kinds of ‘low rank/misleading Yellow Journalism’ done for the sake of cheap hype,” DSLRoot wrote in reply. “It’s obvious to us that whoever is doing this, is either lacking a proper understanding of the subject or doing it intentionally to gain exposure by misleading those who lack proper understanding,” DSLRoot wrote in answer to questions about the company’s intentions.”

“We monitor our clients and prohibit any illegal activity associated with our residential proxies,” DSLRoot continued. “We honestly didn’t know that the guy who made the Reddit post was a military guy. Be it an African-American granny trying to pay her rent or a white kid trying to get through college, as long as they can provide an Internet line or host phones for us — we’re good.”

WHAT IS DSLROOT?

DSLRoot is sold as a residential proxy service on the forum BlackHatWorld under the name DSLRoot and GlobalSolutions. The company is based in the Bahamas and was formed in 2012. The service is advertised to people who are not in the United States but who want to seem like they are. DSLRoot pays people in the United States to run the company’s hardware and software — including 5G mobile devices — and in return it rents those IP addresses as dedicated proxies to customers anywhere in the world — priced at $190 per month for unrestricted access to all locations.

The GlobalSolutions account on BlackHatWorld lists a Telegram account and a WhatsApp number in Mexico. DSLRoot’s profile on the marketing agency digitalpoint.com from 2010 shows their previous username on the forum was “Incorptoday.” GlobalSolutions user accounts at bitcointalk[.]org and roclub[.]com include the email clickdesk@instantvirtualcreditcards[.]com.

Passive DNS records from DomainTools.com show instantvirtualcreditcards[.]com shared a host back then — 208.85.1.164 — with just a handful of domains, including dslroot[.]com, regacard[.]com, 4groot[.]com, residential-ip[.]com, 4gemperor[.]com, ip-teleport[.]com, and proxyrental[.]net.

Cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 finds GlobalSolutions registered on BlackHatWorld in 2016 using the email address prepaidsolutions@yahoo.com. This user shared that their birthday is March 7, 1984.

Several negative reviews about DSLRoot on the forums noted that the service was operated by a BlackHatWorld user calling himself “USProxyKing.” Indeed, Intel 471 shows this user told fellow form members in 2013 to contact him at the Skype username “dslroot.”

USProxyKing had a reputation for spamming the forums with ads for his residential proxy service, and he ran a “pay-per-install” program where he paid affiliates a small commission each time one of their websites resulted in the installation of his unspecified “adware” programs — presumably a program that turned host PCs into proxies. On the other end of the business, USProxyKing sold that pay-per-install access to others wishing to distribute questionable software — at $1 per installation.

Private messages indexed by Intel 471 show USProxyKing also raised money from nearly 20 different BlackHatWorld members who were promised shareholder positions in a new business that would offer robocalling services capable of placing 2,000 calls per minute.

Constella Intelligence, a platform that tracks data exposed in breaches, finds that same IP address GlobalSolutions used to register at BlackHatWorld was also used to create accounts at a handful of sites, including a GlobalSolutions user account at WebHostingTalk that supplied the email address incorptoday@gmail.com. Also registered to incorptoday@gmail.com are the domains dslbay[.]com, dslhub[.]net, localsim[.]com, rdslpro[.]com, virtualcards[.]biz/cc, and virtualvisa[.]cc.

Recall that DSLRoot’s profile on digitalpoint.com was previously named Incorptoday. DomainTools says incorptoday@gmail.com is associated with almost two dozen domains going back to 2008, including incorptoday[.]com, a website that offers to incorporate businesses in several states, including Delaware, Florida and Nevada, for prices ranging from $450 to $550.

As we can see in this archived copy of the site from 2013, IncorpToday also offered a premiere service for $750 that would allow the customer’s new company to have a retail checking account, with no questions asked.

Global Solutions is able to provide access to the U.S. banking system by offering customers prepaid cards that can be loaded with a variety of virtual payment instruments that were popular in Russian-speaking countries at the time, including WebMoney. The cards are limited to $500 balances, but non-Westerners can use them to anonymously pay for goods and services at a variety of Western companies. Cardnow[.]ru, another domain registered to incorptoday@gmail.com, demonstrates this in action.

WHO IS ANDREI HOLAS?

The oldest domain (2008) registered to incorptoday@gmail.com is andrei[.]me; another is called andreigolos[.]com. DomainTools says these and other domains registered to that email address include the registrant name Andrei Holas, from Huntsville, Ala.

Public records indicate Andrei Holas has lived with his brother — Aliaksandr Holas — at two different addresses in Alabama. Those records state that Andrei Holas’ birthday is in March 1984, and that his brother is slightly younger. The younger brother did not respond to a request for comment.

Andrei Holas maintained an account on the Russian social network Vkontakte under the email address ryzhik777@gmail.com, an address that shows up in numerous records hacked and leaked from Russian government entities over the past few years.

Those records indicate Andrei Holas and his brother are from Belarus and have maintained an address in Moscow for some time (that address is roughly three blocks away from the main headquarters of the Russian FSB, the successor intelligence agency to the KGB). Hacked Russian banking records show Andrei Holas’ birthday is March 7, 1984 — the same birth date listed by GlobalSolutions on BlackHatWorld.

A 2010 post by ryzhik777@gmail.com at the Russian-language forum Ulitka explains that the poster was having trouble getting his B1/B2 visa to visit his brother in the United States, even though he’d previously been approved for two separate guest visas and a student visa. It remains unclear if one, both, or neither of the Holas brothers still lives in the United States. Andrei explained in 2010 that his brother was an American citizen.

LEGAL BOTNETS

We can all wag our fingers at military personnel who should undoubtedly know better than to install Internet hardware from strangers, but in truth there is an endless supply of U.S. residents who will resell their Internet connection if it means they can make a few bucks out of it. And these days, there are plenty of residential proxy providers who will make it worth your while.

Traditionally, residential proxy networks have been constructed using malicious software that quietly turns infected systems into traffic relays that are then sold in shadowy online forums. Most often, this malware gets bundled with popular cracked software and video files that are uploaded to file-sharing networks and that secretly turn the host device into a traffic relay. In fact, USPRoxyKing bragged that he routinely achieved thousands of installs per week via this method alone.

These days, there a number of residential proxy networks that entice users to monetize their unused bandwidth (inviting you to violate the terms of service of your ISP in the process); others, like DSLRoot, act as a communal VPN, and by using the service you gain access to the connections of other proxies (users) by default, but you also agree to share your connection with others.

Indeed, Intel 471’s archives show the GlobalSolutions and DSLRoot accounts routinely received private messages from forum users who were college students or young people who were trying to make ends meet. Those messages show that many of DSLRoot’s “regional agents” often sought commissions to refer friends interested in reselling their home Internet connections (DSLRoot would offer to cover the monthly cost of the agent’s home Internet connection).

But in an era when North Korean hackers are relentlessly posing as Western IT workers by paying people to host laptop farms in the United States, letting strangers run laptops, mobile devices or any other hardware on your network seems like an awfully risky move regardless of your station in life. As several Redditors pointed out in Sacapoopie’s thread, an Arizona woman was sentenced in July 2025 to 102 months in prison for hosting a laptop farm that helped North Korean hackers secure jobs at more than 300 U.S. companies, including Fortune 500 firms.

Lloyd Davies is the founder of Infrawatch, a London-based security startup that tracks residential proxy networks. Davies said he reverse engineered the software that powers DSLRoot’s proxy service, and found it phones home to the aforementioned domain proxyrental[.]net, which sells a service that promises to “get your ads live in multiple cities without getting banned, flagged or ghosted” (presumably a reference to CraigsList ads).

Davies said he found the DSLRoot installer had capabilities to remotely control residential networking equipment across multiple vendor brands.

“The software employs vendor-specific exploits and hardcoded administrative credentials, suggesting DSLRoot pre-configures equipment before deployment,” Davies wrote in an analysis published today. He said the software performs WiFi network enumeration to identify nearby wireless networks, thereby “potentially expanding targeting capabilities beyond the primary internet connection.”

It’s unclear exactly when the USProxyKing was usurped from his throne, but DSLRoot and its proxy offerings are not what they used to be. Davies said the entire DSLRoot network now has fewer than 300 nodes nationwide, mostly systems on DSL providers like CenturyLink and Frontier.

On Aug. 17, GlobalSolutions posted to BlackHatWorld saying,”We’re restructuring our business model by downgrading to ‘DSL only’ lines (no mobile or cable).” Asked via email about the changes, DSLRoot blamed the decline in his customers on the proliferation of residential proxy services.

“These days it has become almost impossible to compete in this niche as everyone is selling residential proxies and many companies want you to install a piece of software on your phone or desktop so they can resell your residential IPs on a much larger scale,” DSLRoot explained. “So-called ‘legal botnets’ as we see them.”

The Trump administration on Friday issued an order to stop work on a nearly complete offshore wind energy project, the latest step in the Trump administration’s crackdown on wind power.

In a letter to Orsted, the Danish company developing Revolution Wind, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said its order is tied to concerns about “the protection of national security interests of the United States and prevention of interference with reasonable uses of the exclusive economic zone, the high seas, and the territorial seas.”

The letter did not explain why the project posed national security concerns or interfered with reasonable uses of the area. BOEM did not respond to emailed questions.

The order follows a Thursday announcement from the US Commerce Department that it had initiated an investigation on August 13 into “the effects on the national security of imports of wind turbines and their parts and components,” which could allow Trump to apply increased tariffs to wind turbines.

In a company announcement on Friday, Orsted said that Revolution Wind is already 80 percent complete. It is located in federal waters about 15 miles south of Port Judith, Rhode Island, halfway between Block Island, Rhode Island, and Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

“Orsted is evaluating all options to resolve the matter expeditiously,” the company said, including “engagement with relevant permitting agencies for any necessary clarification or resolution as well as through potential legal proceedings.”

According to the announcement, Revolution Wind is expected to deliver 400 megawatts of electricity to Rhode Island and 304 megawatts to Connecticut—enough to power more than 350,000 homes across the two states.

A spokesperson for Orsted declined an interview request for this story.

Environmental groups and elected officials have criticized the stop-work order and cast doubt on the legitimacy of the administration’s national security concerns.

Pasha Feinberg, an offshore wind specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said any potential concerns would have arisen far earlier in the development process.

“Every single offshore wind project—from the site selection phase all the way through construction and operation—is done in consultation with the Department of Defense,” Feinberg said. “This is, I think, more looking for a reason to discredit offshore wind.”

Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee said in a post on X Saturday that he and Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, both Democrats, would “pursue every avenue” to reverse the stop-work order.

Lamont decried the move as running counter to the Trump administration’s stated goal of energy security and affordability.

The wind project is “exactly the kind of investment that reduces energy costs, strengthens regional production, and builds a more secure energy future—the very goals President Trump claims to support but undermines with this decision,” Lamont said.

Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat and outspoken climate hawk, said in an emailed comment that the move “will cost jobs and millions of dollars of investment in Rhode Island’s offshore wind industry.”

“Wind power is one of the fastest, cheapest ways to meet rising electricity demand—discouraging clean energy will raise energy prices and worsen the looming climate crisis—but payback to fossil fuel donors comes first,” Whitehouse said. “This is what corruption looks like.”

Revolution Wind is one of five offshore wind projects currently under construction in the US, according to Feinberg, and is the second project that the Trump administration has sought to halt this year.

Empire Wind 1, another major project under construction south of Long Island, received a stop-work order in April.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management claimed at the time that “approval for the project was rushed through by the prior administration without sufficient analysis or consultation among the relevant agencies.”

Work on Empire Wind 1 was allowed to resume after BOEM lifted its order in May, following multiple rounds of conversation between Trump and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul.

In a statement to Politico’s E&E News days after the order was lifted in May, the White House claimed that Hochul “caved” and struck an agreement to allow “two natural gas pipelines to advance” through New York.

Hochul denied that any such deal was made.

Trump has made no effort to conceal his disdain for wind power and other renewable energies, and his administration has actively sought to stymie growth in the industry while providing what critics have described as “giveaways” to fossil fuels.

In a Truth Social post on Wednesday, Trump called wind and solar energy the “SCAM OF THE CENTURY,” criticizing states that have built and rely on them for power.

“We will not approve wind or farmer destroying Solar,” Trump wrote. “The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!”

On Trump’s first day in office, the president issued a memorandum halting approvals, permits, leases, and loans for both offshore and onshore wind projects.

The GOP also targeted wind energy in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, accelerating the phaseout of tax credits for wind and solar projects while mandating lease sales for fossil fuels and making millions of acres of federal land available for mining.

The administration’s subsequent consideration of rules to further restrict access to tax credits for wind and solar projects alarmed even some Republicans, prompting Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley and Utah Sen. John Curtis to place holds on Treasury nominees as they awaited the department’s formal guidance.

Those moves have rattled the wind industry and created uncertainty about the viability of ongoing and future projects.

“The unfortunate message to investors is clear: the US is no longer a reliable place for long-term energy investments,” said the American Clean Power Association, a trade association, in a statement on Friday.

To Kathleen Meil, local clean energy deployment director at the League of Conservation Voters, that represents a loss not only for the environment but also for the US economy.

“It’s really easy to think about the visible—the 4,200 jobs across all phases of development that you see… They’ve hit more than 2 million union work hours on Revolution Wind,” Meil said.

“But what’s also really transformational is that it’s already triggered $1.3 billion in investment through the supply chain. So it’s not just coastal communities that are benefiting from these jobs,” she said.

“This hurts so many people. And why? There’s just no justification.”

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

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