Not enough money for Social Security or Medicaid, but . . .

(Liz Landers is a correspondent for PBS News Hour, where she covers the White House and the Trump administration. Prior to joining the News Hour, she served as the national security correspondent for Scripps News, and also reported on disinformation for the network.)

What with Trump’s Iranian war, the advent of data centers, and Trump’s additional hatred of solar energy, we have a serious energy shortage.

Liz Landers:  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 TotalEnergies, 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 in additional payouts were made for two more projects, Bluepoint Wind off the coast of New York and New Jersey and Golden State Wind off the coast of California.

So in the last few months, these payments have totaled nearly $2 billion. The administration had initially tried to block some of these wind projects from going forward, citing national security concerns. Several courts struck that down.

And the Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum, 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.

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 Ocean Energy Management. And she does not think that it is legal for the administration to be taking these kinds of steps. Here’s a little bit of what she had to say.

Elizabeth Klein, Former Director, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management: Many of us believe they have gone outside of what is lawful, certainly outside of any appropriate process.

They have crafted these agreements, which really the best way to describe them are backdoor deals that lack transparency. They lack an appropriate process that you would normally follow.

Liz Landers: Klein says that the agency that she used to oversee does not have the statutory or regulatory authority to refund the monies to these companies after they paid for the lease. And this is raising questions for members of Congress and also Republicans in New York state who are questioning the administration’s moves here.

But Trump has been bribed by the coal interests (He calls it “beautiful coal) to stand in the way of renewable, clean energy. Here’s what he lies (says, which in Trump’s case is the same as lying) about China’s wind energy:

“During a January 9, 2026, meeting at the White House with top oil executives, President Trump made the following statement during the meeting.

“All you have to do is say to China, how many windmill areas do you have in China? So far, they are not able to find any. They use coal, and they use oil and gas and some nuclear, not much. But they don’t have windmills, they make them and sell them to suckers like Europe, and suckers like the United States before.”

The U.S. Department of Energy Says Otherwise.

China has more wind and solar capacity than any other country in the world. The country analysis brief on China released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration in May of 2025, shows that China added 76 gigawatts of wind energy in the year 2024. 

A full 16% of all electric generation in China comes from wind, as shown in the EIA chart below.

“The Largest Wind Power Project in the World. The Jiuquan Wind Power Base, otherwise known as the Gansu Wind Farm, is the world’s largest wind power complex; is located in the Gobi Desert near Jiuquan in China’s Gansu Province; has 7,000 turbines with a planned 20GW capacity; enough to provide electricity to a small country (more than 7.5 million homes).

Started in 2008, this multi-phase project is a major symbol of China’s renewable energy ambitions.”

Fact: China has four times more wind energy than America:

1. Lying
2. Hurting America for his own personal gain.
3. Giving to the rich and taking from the rest.

Social Security supposedly is running short of money. Medicare supposedly is running short of money. Helping the middle class and poor is “unaffordable.” But giving billions of dollars away to prevent wind energy is just fine.

Are there still suckers who vote Republican?

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell