During his first term in office, President Donald Trump repeatedly proposed dramatically cutting funding to the Chesapeake Bay Program — but his efforts were rebuffed by Congress. Now, Trump will re-enter the White House with the bay cleanup effort at a crossroads, and Maryland-based bay advocates and officials are preparing for an uncertain future.

“We don’t know what the Trump administration will propose this time around,” Maryland Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen told The Sun. “But we will be ready, and we will make sure that we protect federal funding to protect the national treasure that is the Chesapeake Bay.”

Around deep-blue Maryland, environmental and climate advocates are largely steeling themselves for another four-year fight for the state’s environmental priorities against a Republican president who speaks ill of offshore wind projects and electric vehicles, who has decried climate change as a hoax and who has promised to advance domestic fossil fuel production and to deregulate and thin the federal bureaucracy.

During his campaign, Trump pledged to halt offshore wind projects “on day one.” But the industry has gained significant momentum since Trump left Washington in 2021, and that growth aligns with Trump’s goals to bolster American energy production and manufacturing, said Sam Salustro, vice president for strategic communications at the Oceantic Network, a Baltimore-based industry group for offshore wind.

“We’re a real industry right now,” Salustro said. “We have tens of billions of dollars going into our industry, thousands of people are working in it. Factories are online up and down the coast and shipyards are absolutely full. So, it’s just a reality.”

Three offshore wind projects are in the installation phase right now, and several more are getting close, including U.S. Wind’s project near Ocean City. The Biden administration has held six lease auctions for offshore wind areas in U.S. oceans, compared to three under Trump. The administration has approved 10 offshore wind projects to Trump’s zero, and set a goal of authorizing 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030.

Stomping the brakes wouldn’t be easy — or beneficial to U.S. industry, Salustro said.

“Eight years ago, the first Trump administration laid out the fundamental framework for our modern offshore wind industry and oversaw three federal lease sales that netted $456 million for the federal treasury,” said Oceantic’s president and CEO Liz Burdock in a statement.

“In some ways, there’s a real opportunity for this incoming administration to finish the work that they started,” Salustro said.

Windmills ‘out the window’?

Like other offshore wind projects nationally, the wind farms bound for Ocean City’s coast have attracted ire from local officials. On Maryland’s heavily conservative Eastern Shore, leaders argue the projects will be an eyesore and harm Atlantic Ocean wildlife, including endangered whales and seabirds. Officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have maintained that no scientific evidence links construction noise from wind farms to an ongoing string of whale deaths in the Atlantic dating back several years, citing other factors such as vessel strikes and fishing gear entanglements.

The town of Ocean City, together with local businesses, organizations and neighboring towns, filed a lawsuit last month challenging the Biden administration’s environmental approval of U.S. Wind’s advancing project, for which construction is targeted to begin next year.

Captain Rob Newberry, chairman of the Delmarva Fisheries Association, which represents some Maryland watermen, is eagerly anticipating Trump’s inauguration, in part because of his pledge to reverse gains in the offshore wind industry.

“The first day in office, the windmills are going to go out the window,” Newberry said.

Newberry feels that the bay restoration effort needs new leadership to address its failings — namely, a tendency to blame “low-hanging fruit,” such as watermen and farmers, for overfishing and pollution rather than addressing major pollution sources from urban areas, including Baltimore City’s ailing wastewater treatment plants, Newberry said.

“A change of guard in the White House means a change of guard in the Chesapeake Bay,” Newberry said. “I guarantee we’re going to have a seat at the table with President Trump.”

Chesapeake Bay restoration

In December, federal and state leaders — including Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican — will convene in Annapolis and chart the future of the interstate compact to restore the nation’s largest estuary. That agreement, forged in 2014, carried a 2025 deadline for nutrient reductions that will not be met. The plan already crafted by Bay Program committees includes a re-commitment to the agreement, and a reevaluation of its goals and deadlines by the end of 2025.

With Trump’s EPA Bay Program in charge of administering the agreement, the tack could change. Under Trump, officials called the agreement aspirational rather than enforceable, and Maryland filed suit alongside other states and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation against the EPA’s lack of enforcement for the bay in Pennsylvania.

The hope is that Trump’s EPA will be a partner in the ongoing cleanup effort, said Hilary Harp Falk, president and CEO of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. But the states could end up playing an important role.

“We will be looking for leadership from the governors at this time. They’ve been tremendous in getting us where we are in discussion with the next bay agreement,” Harp Falk said.

In Maryland, Moore’s administration has been vocal about forging a new path forward for the bay restoration effort based on the scientific research explaining the shortcomings. Earlier this year, Maryland’s legislature passed the Whole Watershed Act, which will result in the selection of five Maryland watersheds to receive targeted funding and water quality projects. The program will be overseen by the Department of Natural Resources, the Department of the Environment and other state agencies.

There were bay victories during Trump’s administration. At the tail end of Trump’s term, federal legislators bolstered bay funding with the historic, bipartisan passage of America’s Conservation Enhancement Act, which Trump signed into law.

Efforts to zero out the EPA’s Bay Program were quashed, in part because legislators knew the funding was heading toward a variety of local projects valued by constituents, said Kristin Reilly, director of the Choose Clean Water Coalition, which is based in Annapolis and represents a number of waterkeeper and water protection groups.

“That’s the beauty of this funding, is that we can really point to exactly where it’s going, the communities that it’s benefiting, the water quality goals it’s helping states achieve,” Reilly said. “Leading with that message that we feel like people can really get behind, that really does cross that partisan divide.”

Van Hollen was among the vocal advocates for the bay funding back then. The Democrat currently sits on the Senate’s appropriations committee and said he intends to keep fighting for Maryland projects, even though the balance of power has shifted, with Republicans taking control of the chamber.

Court balance impact

Trump also has launched attacks on Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which he labeled a “green new scam.” The massive bill funneled tax credits and federal funding toward renewable energy and electric vehicles. But repealing the bill would take an act of Congress, and many of the funds allocated have already been spent, Van Hollen said in an interview.

“The Biden administration has been very deliberate about trying to obligate the funds from the Inflation Reduction Act as quickly as possible, right? So that you can’t claw them back,” Van Hollen said.

Evan Isaacson, a senior environmental attorney at the Chesapeake Legal Alliance, said one of his biggest concerns is the balance of the Supreme Court, which has already been unfriendly to certain environmental regulations. It could tilt further in that direction if Trump makes new appointments in the next four years, he said.

“We’ve already been fighting this uphill battle over the last four years. They were able to pack the court with ultraconservative justices who would then basically side with industry any time an EPA regulation came before them,” Isaacson said.

Last year, in Sackett v. EPA, the court constrained the types of wetlands protected under the federal Clean Water Act. This deregulation at the federal level creates a patchwork of different environmental policies from state to state, Isaacson said. States are allowed to have more stringent protections, and Maryland often does, while other states might not.

“It all kind of feels good when you’re barnstorming around trying to collect votes during election season. It’s in nobody’s best interest to gut the EPA or federal regulations,” Isaacson said. “As an organization that gets requests for legal assistance, we get them from people of all political persuasions. Nobody likes pollution in their backyard.”

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