As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to retake the White House next week, he’s readying an executive order aimed at bringing the East Coast’s infant offshore wind industry to a standstill — a move that could threaten budding developments off the coast of Maryland.

Just how damaging this could be for the industry in the mid-Atlantic may depend on how sweeping an order Trump cooks up.

Trump has tasked a New Jersey congressman and vocal critic of offshore wind with drafting this executive order.

While no offshore wind farms have put turbines off Maryland’s coast yet, its waters are seen as prime territory for tapping the Atlantic Ocean’s enormous wind potential. Three companies have leased waters from the federal government off the Maryland and Delaware coastline.

Maryland leaders have set a nonbinding goal of developing 8.5 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2031, and getting the industry off the ground will be critical to the state’s efforts to transition away from fossil fuels and slash its contributions to climate change.

Trump, though, made his distaste for offshore wind clear on the campaign trail, vowing to end the offshore wind industry as soon as he returned to the White House, and observers expect offshore wind development could face serious setbacks under his presidency.

New Jersey Republican Rep. Jeff Van Drew told the Associated Press he spoke with Trump by phone about a month ago and urged him to act on his campaign promise.

“I said ‘Mr. President, we need to move on this.’ He said, ‘Yeah, we definitely do. I agree. I’m against them.’” Van Drew said Wednesday night. “He said, ‘Write an executive order, get it to my people.’”

A spokesperson for the Baltimore-based U.S. Wind, which is developing 2 gigawatts of offshore wind off Ocean City’s beaches, declined to comment on reports about a potentially imminent executive order. A spokesperson for the Danish company Ørsted, which holds an offshore lease area near the Maryland-Delaware line, also declined to comment. The Norwegian company Equinor, which leased a nearby area last year, did not respond Thursday.

Van Drew said he quickly emailed a draft order to Doug Burgum, Trump’s pick to be interior secretary. Van Drew said the draft is written to halt offshore wind development from Rhode Island to Virginia for six months so the incoming interior secretary could review how leases and permits were issued.

Van Drew said he believes the approvals did not fully take into account the impact on the fishing industry, tourism, whales or Americans’ utility bills, and that it’s problematic to rely on foreign renewable energy companies to build the wind farms.

The Interior Department includes the agency responsible for offshore renewable energy development in federal waters, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

Burgum was asked how he plans to treat offshore wind development as interior secretary during a Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday afternoon. The former North Dakota governor said he plans to review projects the agency has approved, and if “they make sense and they’re already in law,” then they’ll go forward.

Van Drew declined to show the order to the AP, saying he doesn’t expect Trump to use his draft verbatim, it’s a template. He expects Trump to issue an offshore wind executive order within the first quarter of the year, possibly as early as his first day on the job. Van Drew said he views that as a first step toward an eventual moratorium on offshore wind development.

Whether any executive order lands a direct hit against the proposed offshore wind farms near the Eastern Shore likely depends on the particulars.

U.S. Wind secured a final federal permit needed to proceed with its project last month. Still, those permits don’t necessarily mean the project is in the clear, according to some experts.

Ocean City and other seaside communities are pursuing a lawsuit against BOEM over the project’s siting, and Trump could instruct federal attorneys to side with the litigants in that case as an effort to pull back permits.

Ørsted and Equinor’s projects, meanwhile, haven’t secured construction permits yet and may be more vulnerable to shifts in federal policy.

Trump’s team responded to a request for comment Thursday by sharing the transcript from his Mar-a-Lago press conference this month. He said he would seek to have a “policy where no windmills are being built.”

The president-elect has long antagonized offshore wind development. He has suggested that wind turbines cause cancer, often points out the threat wind farms can pose for birds and has repeated unfounded claims about the dangers of wind farms to whales.

“I hate wind,” he reportedly told oil executives during a meeting last year.

President Joe Biden’s administration, on the other hand, worked to propel the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry forward to address climate change as an existential threat. It set targets to deploy 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030, generating enough electricity to power more than 10 million homes, and up to 15 gigawatts of electricity through floating sites by 2035.

The nation’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm opened in March, 12 turbines 35 miles east of Montauk Point, New York, called South Fork Wind.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management held first-ever wind lease sales off the West Coast and the Gulf of Mexico, and the first commercial sale for floating offshore wind on the Atlantic coast. It approved the nation’s 11th commercial-scale offshore wind energy project in December. Combined, the 11 projects total over 19 gigawatts of clean energy, enough to power more than 6 million homes.

The Associated Press contributed to this article.