Solar and wind energy developers say the Department of the Interior has been delaying their work. Now, the agency has blown past a congressionally-mandated deadline to report its progress on energy projects.
The Interior Department failed to submit two required reports to Congress on its reviews and approvals for energy projects, according to a letter from Senate Democrats sent to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and shared exclusively with NOTUS.
The deadline for the reports was March 24, according to the letter spearheaded by Sen. Jeff Merkley, the ranking member on the Senate appropriations subcommittee that oversees the agency. The letter was signed by two other subcommittee Democrats: Sen. Chris Van Hollen and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.
Burgum is expected to testify before the subcommittee next week, where he would likely face questions from these Democrats on the reports.
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“Congress mandated bimonthly reports in the FY2026 Interior-Environment Appropriations Act to better understand the Department’s actions. Yet if anything, things have become more opaque since December,” the Democratic senators wrote in their Wednesday letter. “The Department announced some renewable projects are being considered, but hasn’t shared a list of which projects those are.”
The Interior Department declined to comment.
The progress reports are a new requirement as of this year. During funding negotiations in 2025, Democrats, concerned the Trump administration was stonewalling clean energy projects, persuaded Republicans to add the reporting requirements.
Republicans agreed, with the condition that the reports must cover all energy projects, not just wind and solar development, according to people familiar with the matter who were given anonymity to discuss internal congressional deliberations.
The two reports must be submitted every 60 days: One from the Bureau of Land Management, addressing energy projects on federal lands, and a second from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, addressing all offshore activities, including offshore wind.
These requirements were among the many changes Congress made to appropriations language for 2026 funding to require the Trump administration to be more transparent about what’s happening inside the federal government.
While the administration’s complete hostility to all offshore wind development has been clear since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term, only in recent months have industry actors stepped forward to show how Interior is also causing significant delays for permits for onshore solar and wind projects.
Burgum has quietly enacted a “near complete moratorium” on solar energy project development on both federal and private lands, the Solar Energy Industries Association alleged in a December letter.
Last July, Burgum issued a mandate that all solar and wind energy projects must undergo higher-level agency review. By February 2026, nearly every clean energy company trying to build new projects reported that federal permitting issues were causing significant delays, according to a survey conducted by clean energy finance organization Crux of 50 companies trying to build projects in the United States.
In the letter, the senators also asked for a list of how many people are working on permitting reviews at BLM, as well as how many projects are under review that fall under the requirements of Burgum’s mandate from July.
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