Time and time again, the Trump administration has invoked national security to justify stopping work on offshore wind projects, extending the life of aging coal plants, removing protections for endangered species and more.

What those national security concerns entail is anyone’s guess.

Trump’s day one declaration of a “national energy emergency” supercharged the administration’s efforts to quell renewable energy development while boosting fossil fuels.

Trump invoked the Defense Production Act again Monday to greenlight at least five projects, including in the coal and liquefied natural gas industries. All of the orders referenced his day-one “energy emergency,” but did not specify the alleged threats to national security.

Energy developers, lawyers and environmentalists have been asking the administration in court filings for details on its national security concerns. So far, they’ve been left in the dark.

NOTUS first reported that national security underpinned the administration’s decision last month to exempt oil and gas developers from protecting Rice’s whale, a critically endangered species with only an estimated 50 whales remaining.

Now, new court filings reveal that the administration hasn’t elaborated on how the exemption would advance national security.

“Neither the Committee members, nor Secretary Hegseth (who also attended the meeting), identified any actual conflict between the outcome of any consultation process and any national security interest,” the Center for Biological Diversity said in court documents that are part of a lawsuit against the administration’s decision to end protections for the endangered whales off the Gulf coast.

The group’s filing noted that the federal government has not publicly released any of its internal documentation about the specific national security concerns that necessitated the exemption.

The Natural Resources Defense Council argued in a court case this month that the administration’s justification for allowing Gulf drilling projects to skirt endangered species requirements was “devoid of evidentiary justification and lacks any rational connection between the facts and the ultimate determination that national security necessitates overthrowing critical ESA protections.”

That’s only one example.

Energy experts have told NOTUS that the invocation of national security is vague, at best, and baseless at worst.

“They have these energy emergency executive orders to rely on, and those executive orders use national security framings and language, so that’s the default kind of approach,” Ryan Maher, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, told NOTUS. “A lot of it was pretty superficial.”

Without further clarification from the administration, some legal watchers are openly wondering whether the courts will stop buying it.

“I think the administration is losing credibility in the courts on terms of its narrative about the need for these kinds of things, and I think it’s going to be really hard to justify these findings,” Andy Mergen, a faculty director and professor at Harvard Law School and a former environmental lawyer with the Justice Department, said in a podcast about the endangered species decision.

The Defense Department did not respond to a request for comment. When reached for comment about the endangered species decision, an Interior Department spokesperson directed NOTUS to a statement from White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers.

“The Secretary of War determined that the oil and gas production in the Gulf of America required an exemption under the ESA as it is necessary and essential to the United States’ national security,” Rogers said in the statement.

Trump has invoked national security in several unconventional situations that push legal limits, including saying in court last week that pausing construction on his proposed White House ballroom would threaten national security, without providing additional explanation.

The administration first made the unprecedented move to invoke the Defense Production Act last month to allow an oil and gas company to restart its operations in California, skirting state laws that ban offshore drilling. Trump and Energy Secretary Chris Wright claimed that national security and defense concerns allowed them to use the Cold War-era law to permit Sable Offshore Corp. to begin transporting oil using a rig that had been dormant since a pipeline rupture in 2015.

That reasoning immediately faced pushback.

“Defendants’ national defense and national energy emergency justifications are patently unreasoned,” the state of California said in a March court filing asking a judge to deem the federal government’s use of the wartime statute unlawful.

The state said in its filing that allowing Sable to restart its offshore oil production would only marginally help national security because it would contribute just a fraction of oil to the global market. There’s no pressing crude oil shortage in the country, California lawyers argued.

Energy experts largely agree that despite rising costs and increasing demands, the country isn’t facing the energy emergency that the Trump administration has long claimed, said Deborah Sivas, the co-director of Stanford Law School’s Environmental Law Clinic. That makes the administration’s boost to Sable difficult to take at face value.

“It’s an incredibly novel use of that statute, not to funnel a little money to some industry, not to temporarily stabilize something,” Sivas told NOTUS. “In a time where there’s not really a national emergency or national security issue around this, it’s just a raw power grab by the Fed.”

Trump’s latest orders invoking the same law do not specify projects.

The Energy Department did not respond to a request for comment.

National security has come up as the basis for everything from the administration’s air pollution exemptions for power plants to Trump’s push to keep aging coal plants open past their slated closure dates.

The administration has leveraged national security dating back to at least December, when it ordered five offshore wind projects to stop construction. All five project developers won in court and the projects are back on — with some already supplying power to the grid — but some legal battles have continued as the developers seek to permanently invalidate the federal government’s stop-work orders.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management cited “radar interference” from wind turbines when it stopped the projects in December, though multiple developers said in court filings that the agency did not raise those concerns earlier in the development process. BOEM hasn’t offered much more detail since then, according to new legal filings.

In a court filing last month, the developers of Revolution Wind, a wind farm in Rhode Island, argued that the federal government had not been responsive to multiple requests for more information about the radar concerns that prompted it to halt the project last year, even though people involved with the project have the appropriate security clearances.

“Specifically, as of the date of this filing, Revolution Wind has yet to receive unclassified summaries of the information allegedly supporting” the national security pause, the filing said.

The developers also said that Trump officials had not meaningfully engaged with Revolution Wind’s attempts to propose solutions to any national security issues.

The Interior and Defense departments “remain unwilling to discuss the purported national security concerns or potential ‘mitigation’ in any meaningful way,” the Revolution Wind developers argued in the recent filing.