NABTU STATEMENT ON REVOLUTION WIND STOP-WORK ORDER
Washington, D.C. – August 25, 2025 – Today, North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU) President Sean McGarvey issued the following statement:
“Let’s call the Department of the Interior’s stop-work order for Revolution Wind what it is: President Donald Trump just fired 1,000 of our members who had already labored to complete 80% of this major energy project. A ‘stop-work order’ is the fancy bureaucratic term, but it means one thing: throwing skilled American workers off the job after they’ve spent a decade training, building, and delivering.
“This project isn’t some pipe dream; it’s real steel in the water and $1.3 billion in investment already on the ground. And with the stroke of a pen late on a Friday, President Trump personally signed off on killing these jobs and creating chaos. He pulled the plug on an almost-finished project, taking jobs, paychecks, and food off the tables of working families in Connecticut and Rhode Island.
“President Trump keeps talking a big game about energy dominance, but actions like this prove it’s another empty promise from his Administration. This is not dominance; this is decline. Energy dominance doesn’t mean taking away jobs; it doesn’t mean halting major projects that are nearly finished; it doesn’t mean making America less reliable for investors. The ripple effects of this decision will be felt across the entire country. Projects and industries nationwide are frozen by inconsistent rhetoric and direct actions from this Administration, while Members of Congress can’t or won’t act. These decisions are tanking the construction industry, eliminating thousands of jobs for workers across multiple sectors.
“In the first six months of this Administration, they have killed tens of thousands of jobs, and for the first time in 13 years, building trades members are collecting unemployment checks instead of building the energy dominance President Trump promised. If President Trump can do this to an almost-finished energy project, he will do it to more projects in other sectors, too, and every owner, investor, and contractor at every project stage should be deeply concerned.
“President Trump and Congress must reverse this reckless stop-work order and other looming project cancellations immediately and get America’s construction workers back to work. Stop canceling and shutting down projects. Stop taking away good-paying American jobs. Stop pulling the rug out from under skilled American workers. Fix this now.”
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Media Contact: Betsy Barrett, (202) 997-3266 | bbarrett@nabtu.org
About NABTU: North America’s Building Trades Unions is an alliance of 14 national and international unions in the building and construction industry collectively representing over 3 million skilled craft professionals in the United States and Canada. Each year, our unions and signatory contractor partners invest almost $2 billion in private-sector money to fund and operate over 1,900 apprenticeship training and education facilities across North America that produce the safest, most highly trained, and most productive, skilled craft workers found anywhere in the world. NABTU is dedicated to creating economic security and employment opportunities for its construction workers by safeguarding wage and benefits standards, promoting responsible private capital investments, investing in renowned apprenticeship and training, and creating more construction career pathways to the middle class for women, communities of color, Indigenous people, veterans, and the justice-involved. For more information, please visit nabtu.org.