Interior Must Improve Outreach on Offshore Wind, Watchdog Finds

The Interior Department isn’t doing a good enough job of engaging with tribes, fisheries, and other groups when overseeing offshore wind projects, the Government Accountability Office said in a report issued Monday.

The GAO’s critiques and recommendations for improvement come at a perilous time for an industry that has been repeatedly threatened by the Trump administration.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) doesn’t “consistently demonstrate efforts” to consider or address tribal input, according to the report. Making matters worse, nearly all the tribal officials GAO interviewed said they don’t have the capacity to properly review documents or meaningfully ...