A single winning ticket for a Mega Millions lottery jackpot of at least $1.35 billion, the second largest jackpot in U.S. history, was sold in Maine, lottery organizers said Saturday.

“Congratulations to the Maine State Lottery, which has just won its first-ever Mega Millions jackpot,” Ohio Lottery director Pat McDonald, lead director for the Mega Millions Consortium, said in a statement. “It’s the fourth billion-dollar jackpot in Mega Millions history.”

The winning ticket, which cost $2 and matched all six numbers, was bought at Hometown Gas & Grill convenience store in Lebanon, Maine. The ticket holder, yet to be identified, has the choice of a lump-sum payment of $723.5 million or an annual payout over 30 years.

Most winners go for the lump sum, which comes with a hefty tax bill, according to the Mega Millions website.

The winning numbers for the jackpot were 30, 43, 45, 46 and 61, plus the power ball 14.

“This is a small rural town in southern Maine,” Fred Cotreau, the owner of Hometown Gas & Grill told Reuters. “We do not know yet who the winner is, but we are anxiously awaiting to see if it’s one of our friends.”

The jackpot had been rolling since it was last won Oct. 14, when a $502 million prize was shared by winning tickets in California and Florida. It is the second largest in the 20-year history of the game, topped only by the $1.537 billion won in South Carolina in October 2018.

In addition to the jackpot-winning ticket, 14 tickets matched all five numbers to win the game’s second-tier prize of $1 million. Four were sold in New York, two in California and one each in Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Texas.

Half of the proceeds from the sale of each Mega Millions ticket remains in the state where the ticket was sold, where the money supports lottery beneficiaries, such as education or public employee pensions, and retailer commissions.

Cotreau stands to receive a substantial bonus for the ticket.

“I don’t know yet, but I’m gonna call my lottery agent first thing Monday morning to find out.”
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Key dates related to the discovery of classified documents tied to U.S. President Joe Biden, based on statements from the White House, the president, and Attorney General Merrick Garland:

Jan. 20, 2017: Biden's two terms as vice president to President Barack Obama end.
Mid-2017-2019: Biden periodically uses an office at the Penn Biden Center, a think tank in Washington.
Jan. 20, 2021: Biden is sworn in as president.
Nov. 2, 2022: Biden's personal attorneys come across Obama-Biden administration documents in a locked closet while packing files as they prepare to close out Biden's office in the Penn Biden Center. They notify the National Archives.
Nov. 3, 2022: The National Archives takes possession of the documents.
Nov. 4, 2022: The National Archives informs the Justice Department about the documents.
Nov. 8, 2022: Midterm elections.
November-December 2022: Biden's lawyers search the president's homes in Wilmington, Delaware, and Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, to see if there are other documents from his vice presidency.
Nov. 9, 2022: The FBI begins an assessment of whether classified information has been mishandled.
Nov. 14, 2022: Garland assigns U.S. attorney John Lausch to look into whether a special counsel should be appointed to investigate the matter.
Dec. 20, 2022: Biden's personal counsel informs Lausch that a second batch of classified documents has been discovered in the garage of Biden's Wilmington home. The FBI goes to Biden's home in Wilmington and secures the documents.
Jan. 5, 2023: Lausch advises Garland he believes that appointing a special counsel is warranted.
Jan. 9, 2023: CBS News, followed by other news organizations, reveals the discovery of the documents at the Penn Biden Center. The White House acknowledges that "a small number" of Obama-Biden administration records, including some with classified markings, were found at the center. It makes no mention of the documents found in Wilmington.
Jan. 10: 2023: For the first time, Biden addresses the document issue. During a press conference in Mexico City, he says he was "surprised to learn that there were any documents" in the Penn Biden Center and doesn't know what's in them. He does not mention the documents found in Wilmington.
Jan. 11, 2023: Biden's lawyers complete their search of Biden's residences, find one additional classified document in the president's personal library in Wilmington. NBC News and other news organizations reveal a second batch of documents has been found at a location other than the Penn Biden Center.
Jan. 12, 2023: Biden's lawyer informs Lausch that an additional classified document has been found. Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president, reveals publicly for the first time that documents were found in Biden's Wilmington garage and one document was found in an adjacent room. Garland announces that he has appointed Robert Hur, a former U.S. attorney in the Trump administration, to serve as special counsel.
Jan. 14, 2023: The White House reveals that Biden's lawyers found more classified documents at his home than previously known. Sauber said in a statement that a total of six pages of classified documents were found during a search of Biden's private library. Sauber said Biden's personal lawyers, who did not have security clearances, stopped their search after finding the first page on Wednesday evening. Sauber found the remaining material Thursday as he was facilitating their retrieval by the Justice Department.

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Lawyers for President Joe Biden found more classified documents at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, than previously known, the White House acknowledged Saturday.

White House lawyer Richard Sauber said in a statement that a total of six pages of classified documents were found during a search of Biden’s private library. The White House had said previously that only a single page was found there.

The latest disclosure is in addition to the discovery of documents found in December in Biden’s garage and in November at his former offices at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, from his time as vice president. The apparent mishandling of classified documents and official records from the Obama administration is under investigation by a former U.S. attorney, Robert Hur, who was appointed as a special counsel on Thursday by Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Sauber said in a statement Saturday that Biden’s personal lawyers, who did not have security clearances, stopped their search after finding the first page on Wednesday evening. Sauber found the remaining material Thursday, as he was facilitating their retrieval by the Justice Department.

“While I was transferring it to the DOJ officials who accompanied me, five additional pages with classification markings were discovered among the material with it, for a total of six pages,” Sauber said. “The DOJ officials with me immediately took possession of them.”

Sauber has previously said that the White House was “confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced, and the president and his lawyers acted promptly upon discovery of this mistake.”

Sauber’s statement did not explain why the White House waited two days to provide an updated accounting of the number of classified records. The White House is already facing scrutiny for waiting more than two months to acknowledge the discovery of the initial group of documents at the Biden office.

On Thursday, asked whether Biden could guarantee that additional classified documents would not turn up in a further search, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters, “You should assume that it’s been completed, yes.”

Sauber reiterated Saturday that the White House would cooperate with Hur’s investigation.

Bob Bauer, the president’s personal lawyer, said his legal team has “attempted to balance the importance of public transparency where appropriate with the established norms and limitations necessary to protect the investigation’s integrity.”

The Justice Department historically imposes a high legal bar before bringing criminal charges in cases involving the mishandling of classified information, with a requirement that someone intended to break the law as opposed to being merely careless or negligent in doing so. The primary statute governing the illegal removal and retention of classified documents makes it a crime to “knowingly” remove classified documents and store them in an unauthorized way.

The circumstances involving Biden, at least as so far known, differ from a separate investigation into the mishandling of classified documents at former President Donald Trump’s private club and residence in Florida.

In Trump’s case, special counsel Jack Smith is investigating whether anyone sought to obstruct their investigation into the retention of classified records at the Palm Beach estate. Justice Department officials have said Trump’s representatives failed to fully comply with a subpoena that sought the return of classified records, prompting agents to return to the home with a search warrant so they could collect additional materials.

 
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The Biden administration is nearing deals with two Pacific Island nations to extend ties that are considered critical to maintaining balance in the U.S.-China rivalry for influence in a region where the Chinese are rapidly expanding their economic, diplomatic and military clout. 

This week, the U.S. signed memorandums of understanding with the Marshall Islands and Palau that administration officials hope will pave the way for the quick completion of broader agreements that will govern the islands’ relations with Washington for the next two decades. Those ties grant the U.S. unique military and other security rights on the islands in return for substantial aid. 

The administration believes that extending those so-called “Compacts of Free Association” agreements will be key to efforts to retain American power and blunt Chinese assertiveness throughout the Indo-Pacific.

The memorandums signed this week lay out the amounts of money that the federal government will provide to the Marshall Islands and Palau if their compacts are successfully renegotiated. Negotiations on a similar memorandum with a third compact country, Micronesia, are ongoing.

The current 20-year compacts with the Marshall Islands and Micronesia expire this year; the current compact with Palau expires in 2024 but administration officials said they believe all three can be renewed and signed by mid- to late-spring.

Officials would not discuss specifics of the amounts of money involved because the deals aren’t yet legally binding and must still be reviewed and approved by Congress as part of the budget process.

A Micronesian news outlet, Marianas Variety, reported Thursday that the Marshall Islands will receive $700 million over four years under the memorandum that it signed. But that amount would cover only one-fifth of a 20-year compact extension and does not include the amount Palau would receive.

Joe Yun, Biden’s special presidential envoy for compact negotiations, said the amounts will be far greater than what the U.S. had provided in the past.

Islanders have long complained that the previous compacts they signed did not adequately address their needs or long-term environmental and health issues caused by U.S. nuclear testing in the 1950s and ’60s. Lawmakers had expressed concern dating back to 2021 that the administration was not giving enough attention to the matter.

Yun, who signed the memorandums with representatives of the Marshalls and Palau on Tuesday and Wednesday in Los Angeles, said the Marshall Islands would be compensated for such damage and would be given control over how that money is spent.

Yun said it would pay “nuclear-affected communities’ health, welfare and development” and noted that the U.S. had committed to building a new hospital as well as a museum in the Marshalls to preserve the memory and legacy of their role, notably in the Pacific theater during WWII.

This week’s signings clear the way for individual federal agencies — including the Postal Service, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the National Weather Service — to negotiate their own agreements with the Marshalls and Palau, which will then become part of the broader compacts.

Along with the federal money, those agencies provide their services to the islands. In return, the U.S. is given unique military and national security basing rights and privileges in an area where China is increasingly flexing its muscles.

Yun said China did not come up specifically in the negotiations, but it was a major element in all sides’ discussions.

“The threat from China is unstated but there is no question that China is a factor,” Yun said. Not only does China have a large and growing economic presence in the region, but the Marshall Islands and Palau both recognize Taiwan diplomatically. “They are coming under Chinese pressure,” he said.

China has steadily poached allies from Taiwan in the Pacific, including Kiribati and the Solomon Islands in 2019. The U.S. announced plans last year to reopen an embassy in the Solomon Islands, which has signed a security agreement with China.

Since World War II, the U.S. has treated the Marshall Islands, along with Micronesia and Palau, much like territories. On the Marshall Islands, the U.S. has developed military, intelligence and aerospace facilities in a region where China is particularly active.

In turn, U.S. money and jobs have benefited the islands’ economy. And many islanders have taken advantage of their ability to live and work in the U.S., moving in the thousands to Arkansas, Guam, Hawaii, Oregon and Oklahoma.
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 The recent discovery of classified documents at U.S. President Joe Biden’s former office at a think tank in Washington and his home in Delaware has invited comparisons to a case involving former President Donald Trump’s handling of government records.

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Thursday that he was appointing a special counsel to examine the Biden documents case, just weeks after he named a special counsel to investigate Trump’s handling of classified documents at his Florida estate.

Meanwhile, Representative Jim Jordan, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said on Friday that the panel will investigate the Justice Department’s handling of both cases, saying “we have a similar situation happening to President Biden.”

But with much of both investigations under wraps, legal experts cautioned against drawing hasty comparisons.

“I think it’s very early to be making comparisons generally as there is more information publicly known about the Mar-a-Lago matter and other matters than there are about the [current] president’s case,” said Jordan Strauss, a former federal prosecutor now a managing director at Kroll.

Here is a look at the similarities and differences between the two cases and the stakes for Biden and Trump:

What documents were found

Both cases involve classified documents, including some marked “top secret.”

Federal investigators have recovered more than 300 documents with classified markings that left the White House with Trump, according to court documents.

About 100 of those documents, some of them classified as “top secret,” were seized during the FBI’s August 2022 search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

By comparison, Biden’s personal lawyers say they found a “small number” of classified documents – said to number fewer than a dozen – at the Washington office of the Penn Biden Center on Nov. 2, 2022, and another “small” batch at Biden’s Delaware home on Dec. 20.

But legal experts said the substance of the documents is more important than their number.

“What matters to me … is what those documents were,” said Charles Stimson, a former federal prosecutor and deputy assistant secretary of defense who is now a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation.  “I mean you could have one document that had special compartmentalized information in it that could be incredibly damaging if disclosed to the wrong people versus 40 documents that were classified but not as important.”

The government has not disclosed the content of the classified documents under investigation, but news reports have suggested that among the records recovered from Trump was sensitive information about China and Iran’s missile program.

CNN reported this week that the 10 documents found in Biden’s office included “intelligence memos and briefing materials” about Ukraine, Iran and the United Kingdom.

What criminal charges could Biden and Trump face?

Under the Presidential Records Act, presidential records belong to the government and must be handed over to the National Archives and Records Administration at the end of a president’s term in office.

What is more, the Espionage Act of 1917 prohibits the improper disclosure, publishing or mishandling of classified information.

Inadvertently taking classified documents home or to another unauthorized location doesn’t always result in a criminal penalty.

From prosecutors’ perspectives, far more important is what someone does when they find documents that they are not authorized to keep.

In Biden’s case, his lawyers say they turned over the documents to the government without delay and that they’re cooperating with the National Archives and the Justice Department.

In Trump’s case, the FBI executed a search warrant of Mar-a-Lago for documents in his possession after he failed to turn them over in response to a May 2022 subpoena.

Strauss said the Justice Department investigation of Trump’s handling of classified documents appears to be more focused on “what the former president’s actions were after receiving the demand and the subpoena.”

With the investigation into the Biden documents case, “it’s too early to know exactly what the focus will be on President Biden,” Strauss said.

“Depending on how this is handled, can be anything from a simple security violation all the way up to a much more serious crime, and that’s all very fact dependent,” Strauss said.

Who are the special counsels?

Citing “extraordinary circumstances,” Garland has appointed separate special counsels to investigate the Trump and Biden documents cases.

Jack Smith, a former chief of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, is leading the investigation of Trump’s handling of documents.

Robert Hur, a former U.S. Attorney and Justice Department official under Trump, is heading the Biden probe.

A special counsel is a quasi-independent prosecutor appointed when a perceived conflict of interest might cast doubt on the integrity of a Justice Department investigation.

While the appointment of a semi-independent prosecutor will shield the investigations from any perception of undue political influence, it is ultimately the attorney general who will decide whether to file any criminal charges against either Trump or Biden, Stimson said. 

“And so that process has to play out.”

Complicating any decision by Garland is a long-standing Justice Department legal opinion that states a sitting president can’t be indicted.

“So it definitely makes things harder for the Justice Department, particularly for a Justice Department that is so publicly committed to restoring faith in the rule of law,” Strauss said.
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With rain-soaked California expected to see more stormy weather over the weekend and into next week, Gov. Gavin Newsom, and other state and federal officials pleaded with residents Friday to stay alert to possibly more flooding and damage.

A series of storms has walloped the state since late December, leaving at least 19 people dead. On Friday, 6,000 people were under evacuation orders and another 20,000 households were without power, said Nancy Ward, the director of the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services.

Homes have flooded, levees breached and topped, and mudslides and hurricane-force winds have slammed parts of the state, including a tornado touchdown in Northern California, she said at a press briefing with Deanne Criswell, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who was in California to tour damage.

“People will become complacent, but the ground is saturated. It is extremely, extremely dangerous,” Ward said. “And that water can continue to rise well after the storms have passed.”

The ongoing atmospheric river pattern brought showers to Northern California early Friday, and additional surges of moisture, which will be even stronger, are expected to again spread rain and snow elsewhere in the state over the coming days.

In the last 18 days, a state plagued by drought has averaged more than 23 centimeters of rainfall a day — a remarkable amount that has seen some locations meet their average annual rainfall already, said David Lawrence, meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

A Saturday storm will bring widespread, powerful rainfall and heavy mountain snowfall — with wind gusts of up to 97 kph and the possibility of more trees falling and power outages, he said.

There have been at least 19 storm-related deaths, and half of those have involved motorists, with some of the deaths preventable if drivers had heeded road closure signs, said Sean Duryee, acting commissioner of the California Highway Patrol.

On Friday, Newsom visited the upscale community of Montecito in Santa Barbara County — which had been evacuated earlier in the week — on the fifth-year anniversary of the mudslide that killed 23 people and destroyed more than 100 homes in the coastal enclave.

He thanked members of the California National Guard for clearing debris out of a catch basin that was constructed after the mudslide in order to divert rain. He also asked residents to exercise caution, and to heed warnings from public safety and law enforcement.

“I know how fatigued you all are,” Newsom said. “Just maintain a little more vigilance over the course of the next weekend.”

On Monday, President Joe Biden issued an emergency declaration to support storm response and relief efforts in more than a dozen counties, but Newsom is still waiting on the White House to declare a major disaster declaration that would provide more resources.

Flood warnings were in effect for the Salinas River in an agricultural valley about 145 kilometers south of San Francisco. At least 8,094 hectares of farmland were at risk of flooding, the National Weather Service said.

In some parts of Northern California, cars were submerged, trees uprooted, and roofs blown off homes.

In Southern California, authorities determined that a storm-related sewage spill into the Ventura River was much bigger than initially thought. Two Ojai Valley Sanitary District sewer lines damaged on Jan. 9 spilled more 53 million liters, the Ventura County Environmental Health Division said Thursday. Warning signs have been placed along the river and beaches.

East of Los Angeles, Santa Anita Park proactively canceled Saturday’s horse-racing event, an eight-race card, due to the rain forecast. Those races will be run as extras on three subsequent days, the track said.

Damage assessments, which have already started, are expected to surpass $1 billion. 
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An upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case that asks whether tech firms can be held liable for damages related to algorithmically generated content recommendations has the ability to “upend the internet,” according to a brief filed by Google this week.

The case, Gonzalez v. Google LLC, is a long-awaited opportunity for the high court to weigh in on interpretations of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. A provision of federal law that has come under fire from across the political spectrum, Section 230 shields technology firms from liability for content published by third parties on their platforms, but also allows those same firms to curate or bar certain content.

The case arises from a complaint by Reynaldo Gonzalez, whose daughter was killed in an attack by members of the terror group ISIS in Paris in 2015. Gonzales argues that Google helped ISIS recruit members because YouTube, the online video hosting service owned by Google, used a video recommendation algorithm that suggested videos published by ISIS to individuals who displayed interest in the group.

Gonzalez’s complaint argues that by recommending content, YouTube went beyond simply providing a platform for ISIS videos, and should therefore be held accountable for their effects.

Dystopia warning

The case has garnered the attention of a multitude of interested parties, including free speech advocates who want tech firms’ liability shield left largely intact. Others argue that because tech firms take affirmative steps to keep certain content off their platforms, their claims to be simple conduits of information ring hollow, and that they should therefore be liable for the material they publish.

In its brief, Google painted a dire picture of what might happen if the latter interpretation were to prevail, arguing that it “would turn the internet into a dystopia where providers would face legal pressure to censor any objectionable content. Some might comply; others might seek to evade liability by shutting their eyes and leaving up everything, no matter how objectionable.”

Not everyone shares Google’s concern.

“Actually all it would do is make it so that Google and other tech companies have to follow the law just like everybody else,” Megan Iorio, senior counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told VOA.

“Things are not so great on the internet for certain groups of people right now because of Section 230,” said Iorio, whose organization filed a friend of the court brief in the case. “Section 230 makes it so that tech companies don’t have to respond when somebody tells them that non-consensual pornography has been posted on their site and keeps on proliferating. They don’t have to take down other things that a court has found violate the person’s privacy rights. So you know, to [say] that returning Section 230 to its original understanding is going to create a hellscape is hyperbolic.”

Unpredictable effects

Experts said the Supreme Court might try to chart a narrow course that leaves some protections intact for tech firms, but allows liability for recommendations. However, because of the prevalence of algorithmic recommendations on the internet, the only available method to organize the dizzying array of content available online, any ruling that affects them could have a significant impact.

“It has pretty profound implications, because with tech regulation and tech law, things can have unintended consequences,” John Villasenor, a professor of engineering and law and director of the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law and Policy, told VOA.

“The challenge is that even a narrow ruling, for example, holding that targeted recommendations are not protected, would have all sorts of very complicated downstream consequences,” Villasenor said. “If it’s the case that targeted recommendations aren’t protected under the liability shield, then is it also true that search results that are in some sense customized to a particular user are also unprotected?”

26 words

The key language in Section 230 has been called, “the 26 words that created the internet.” That section reads as follows:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher of or speaker of information provided by another information content provider.”

At the time the law was drafted in the 1990s, people around the world were flocking to an internet that was still in its infancy. It was an open question whether an internet platform that gave individual third parties the ability to post content on them, such as a bulletin board service, was legally liable for that content.

Recognizing that a patchwork of state-level libel and defamation laws could leave developing internet companies exposed to crippling lawsuits, Congress drafted language meant to shield them. That protection is credited by many for the fact that U.S. tech firms, particularly in Silicon Valley, rose to dominance on the internet in the 21st century.

Because of the global reach of U.S. technology firms, the ruling in Gonzalez v. Google LLC is likely to echo far beyond the United States when it is handed down.

Legal groundwork

The groundwork for the Supreme Court’s decision to take the case was laid in 2020, when Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in response to an appeal that, “in an appropriate case, we should consider whether the text of this increasingly important statute aligns with the current state of immunity enjoyed by internet platforms.”

That statement by Thomas, arguably the court’s most conservative member, heartened many on the right who are concerned that “Big Tech” firms enjoy too much cultural power in the U.S., including the ability to deny a platform to individuals with whose views they disagree.

Gonzalez v. Google LLC is remarkable in that many cases that make it to the Supreme Court do so in part because lower courts have issued conflicting decisions, requiring an authoritative ruling from the high court to provide legal clarity.

Gonzalez’s case, however, has been dismissed by two lower courts, both of which held that Section 230 rendered Google immune from the suit.

Conservative concerns

Politicians have been calling for reform of Section 230 for years, with both Republicans and Democrats joining the chorus, though frequently for different reasons.

Former President Donald Trump regularly railed against large technology firms, threatening to use the federal government to rein them in, especially when he believed that they were preventing him or his supporters from getting their messages out to the public.

His concern became particularly intense during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, when technology firms began working to limit the spread of social media accounts that featured misinformation about the virus and the safety of vaccinations.

Trump was eventually kicked off Twitter and Facebook after using those platforms to spread false claims about the 2020 presidential election, which he lost, and to help organize a rally that preceded the assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Major figures in the Republican Party are active in the Gonzalez case. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and Texas Senator Ted Cruz have both submitted briefs in the case urging the court to crack down on Google and large tech firms in general.

“Confident in their ability to dodge liability, platforms have not been shy about restricting access and removing content based on the politics of the speaker, an issue that has persistently arisen as Big Tech companies censor and remove content espousing conservative political views,” Cruz writes.

Biden calls for reform

Section 230 criticism has come from both sides of the aisle. On Wednesday, President Joe Biden published an essay in The Wall Street Journal urging “Democrats and Republicans to come together to pass strong bipartisan legislation to hold Big Tech accountable.”

Biden argues for a number of reforms, including improved privacy protections for individuals, especially children, and more robust competition, but he leaves little doubt about what he sees as a need for Section 230 reform.

“[W]e need Big Tech companies to take responsibility for the content they spread and the algorithms they use,” he writes. “That’s why I’ve long said we must fundamentally reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects tech companies from legal responsibility for content posted on their sites.”
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The U.S. Department of the Interior will reform its regulations for the development of wind energy facilities on the country’s outer continental shelf to help meet crucial climate goals, it said in a statement on Thursday.

The proposed rule changes would save developers a projected $1 billion over a 20-year period by streamlining burdensome processes, clarifying ambiguous provisions, and lowering compliance costs, , the statement said.

“Updating these regulations will facilitate the safe and efficient development of offshore wind energy resources, provide certainty to developers and help ensure a fair return to the U.S. taxpayers,” U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in the release.

The reforms come days after the department named Elizabeth Klein, a lawyer who worked in the Obama and Clinton administrations, to head its Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), overseeing offshore oil, gas and wind development.

As part of its offshore clean energy program, the BOEM has over the past two years approved the first two commercial scale offshore wind projects in the United States, held three lease auctions including the first-ever sale off the coast of California, and explored extending offshore wind to other areas like the Gulf of Mexico.

The department expects to hold as many as four more auctions and review at least 16 new commercial facilities by 2025, adding more than 22 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy.

In September last year, President Joe Biden’s administration set a goal of having 15 GW of floating offshore wind capacity by 2035 to accelerate development of next-generation floating wind farms in line with its target of permitting 30 GW of offshore wind by 2030.
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