Alaska Beacon

Federal funds for adult education services were among those blocked by the Trump administration on July 1, causing immediate cuts to Alaska adult education and workforce development programs and staff layoffs.

The U.S. Department of Education has withheld more than $6 billion in congressionally approved grants for education, including over $629 million for adult education basic grants, and more than $85 million in adult integrated English literacy and civics education grants. The administration has said that it’s withholding the federal funding to review the grant programs to ensure they align with the Republican president’s priorities.

Adult education can range from classes that help adults learn basic literacy to programs that assist students in gaining certificates equivalent to high school diplomas, and can teach skills that are essential to performing certain jobs.

Alaska had over $1.1 million allocated as part of an adult education basic grant, according to the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development, which administers the grants. A department spokesperson said on Tuesday the grant amounts for English literacy and civics education this year were not available, but the state received more than $99,600 last year.

The withheld funds means immediate cuts to services for Alaska adult learners and staff layoffs, according to grant recipients.

“We were definitely blindsided,” said Lucie Magrath, executive director of the Literacy Council of Alaska, a Fairbanks-based nonprofit that provides adult education programs, including adult literacy, English language learning, civics and General Educational Development, or GED, preparation classes.

Magrath said an estimated $180,000 in federal funding, or over half of their budget, was impounded, causing immediate cuts to services and staff layoffs. While the organization did not identify the number of layoffs in an interview last week, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner has since reported that there were five layoffs.

“So we are having to make some pretty drastic decisions with staffing and programming,” she said in a phone interview on Thursday. “We likely will not be able to serve nearly as many people this year, and we’re making staffing cuts right now.”

The organization provides in-person and virtual instruction and mentoring to adult learners in Fairbanks, as well as in villages in the Interior and Western Alaska, stretching from the Yukon Flats to the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.

They also have a workforce development program, the Pathways Program, serving youths and young adults ages 16 to 24, and run the used bookstore Forget-Me-Not Books in Fairbanks, which provides revenues for its programs, jobs training and employment.

Shelby Cooke is the assistant executive director of the Literacy Council of Alaska, and said it’s difficult to fill such a large funding gap, especially on such short notice, and Alaskans will be impacted.

“The real detriment is to our students and Alaskans who need that GED credential to go to work, or maybe they’re a super-skilled person in their native tongue, but they need enough English to be able to navigate a job interview,” she said. “Those are the folks that are suffering, and in turn, our economy suffers too.”

Magrath said some programs will be suspended immediately. It’s possible that these suspensions will be temporary, as her organization figures out its next steps. “We’re looking at restructuring some of our programs just to be able to use the resources that we have to the maximum impact for our community and our students,” she said. “So we have a lot to figure out right now.”

Southeast Regional Resource Center is a nonprofit educational services agency that provides a variety of services statewide, including adult education, English language learning and workforce development programs. In addition, SERRC provides educational and business services to school districts, including special education programs, human resources and grant administration.

“We do have some state funds, and so we’ve had to modify our budget just off what we know we have for funding — for state funds — and we are looking at having to reduce our staffing,” said Chris Reitan, its executive director, in a phone interview Thursday. He said the organization is looking at cutting at least two staff positions and a few part-time positions. “So we are concerned about the ability to have the same level of impact.”

Reitan said the federal funding freeze withheld over $86,600 for adult education programs in Southeast Alaska, and over $64,000 in the Aleutians region.

He said SERRC’s program served 112 students last year in the areas of GED support, English language learning and workforce development across the state.

“Number one, adult education provides a kind of a lifeline for Alaskans seeking to improve their lives, and it also helps strengthen our state’s workforce,” he said, and will have an immediate impact on adult learners, “which then could immediately impact their ability in regards to getting good-paying jobs, their ability to provide for their families, their ability to contribute to their local communities.”

He added: “I see this as being a significant impact across the state, in regards to our citizens being able to have the opportunity to better themselves.”

SERRC and the Literacy Council of Alaska are two of 14 adult education programs across the state with grant funding administered by the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development. A department spokesperson, Adam Weinert, said by email that the department has continued to award available state matching funds for the programs, totaling more than $1.9 million.

“Sub-grantees were informed that we were moving forward at this time with state funding only,”  Weinert said of the programs. “Once federal funding is released, we will move forward with a budget modification to provide for the federal funding.”

The full impact of how the freeze will affect some programs in the long term remains unclear.

The University of Alaska system has several adult education programs, funded in part by federal funds, as well as state and local funding. Jonathan Taylor, the university’s director of communications, said by email Monday that “discussions are ongoing” around funding but those programs are scheduled to continue.

Taylor said at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the Bristol Bay Adult Education program will start up in August with funding from Bristol Bay Economic Development Corp.

Within the University of Alaska Anchorage, there are adult education programs at Kodiak College, serving the Kodiak Island Borough; Kenai Peninsula College, serving the Soldotna, Homer and Seward regions; and Prince William Sound College, serving the Valdez, Cordova and Copper Basin regions.

“We have received assurances that all three will receive some sort of funding this year,” Taylor said. “To our knowledge, the state will initiate these awards using either state funding or federal funding it has access to. If additional Federal Funds become available, the state will amend the agreements to make up to the original intended funding amount. Currently, this is an active endeavor and ongoing discussion with the state.”

For the first time, scientists have made a definite link between the toxin produced by algae that causes paralytic shellfish poisoning and marine mammal deaths.

Fur seals found dead last August on Alaska’s St. Paul Island had significant levels of saxitoxin in their bodies, as did several of the dead fish around them.

It was the clearest evidence ever found for this type of toxin-caused death, scientists say.

“I would say this is the absolute strongest case for saxitoxin poisoning in marine mammals anywhere,” said Kathi Lefebvre, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research biologist and the lead author of a study detailing the findings, published in the journal Marine Mammals Science in May.

The discovery, a warning for local communities that rely on subsistence hunting, comes as long-term warming in the Bering and Chukchi seas is increasing the prevalence of a type of algae that produces saxitoxin is becoming more prevalent in these bodies of water.

Dangerous blooms of the Alexandrium have long been observed in more southern waters of Alaska, where paralytic shellfish poisoning is a well-recognized and sometimes deadly hazard. Clams are notorious for accumulating saxitoxin, and there are frequent safety advisories that warn people of specific sites’ shellfish poisoning dangers, and two labs in the state — one in Anchorage operated by the Department of Environmental Conservation and one in Sitka operated by the Sitka Tribe of Alaska — test harvested shellfish to determine whether it is safe for human consumption.

Farther north, the emergence of large Alexandrium blooms and potentially dangerous saxitoxin levels is new. But, as Lefebvre explains it, the conditions to create those toxin hazards have been set up over decades and possibly even centuries.

Over time, ocean currents have carried bits of Alexandrium algae north, and over time, that algae has dropped to the bottom of the ocean. That created massive beds of dormant cysts, the equivalent of algal seeds.

The Bering, Chukchi and even Beaufort seas hold some of the highest concentrations of Alexandrium cysts ever found in the world, according to Don Anderson, a harmful algal specialist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Anderson led research teams that mapped out Alaska cyst beds over several years, including a bed in the Chukchi that he said is the biggest ever discovered.

Those cyst beds were dormant until recently, said Lefebvre, who works closely with Anderson.

“They’ve just been building and building and building. And then in the last couple decades – actually, the last 10 years, maybe — the bottom temperature finally was warm enough for cyst germination,” Lefebvre said. That appears to be the cause of the large blooms now being found routinely in the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort seas, she said.

Dead fur seals and fish

In the case of the St. Paul fur seals, local beachcombers found 10 dead animals at a site on the northeastern side of the island called Benson Beach. It is a catchment site where marine debris, kelp and other items are known to accumulate, said Lauren Divine, director of the island’s Tribal ecosystem conservation office.

Tribal representatives managed to retrieve some of the dead seals, as well as some of the dead fish with them, said Divine, who works for the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island. They photographed the scene and gathered whatever information they could, and they contacted the NOAA-coordinated Alaska Marine Mammal Stranding Network and Anchorage-based veterinarian pathologist Kathy Burek-Huntington to continue the investigation, she said.

It was clearly a startling discovery, Divine said.

“This was something that everyone was quite alarmed (at) and noticed as something that was wrong in the ecosystem and something that really hadn’t ever been noticed or detected before,” she said. “So we were pretty adamant about really trying to do the best job that we could to collect as much information as we could about the event, and also with quite little capacity that we have out in the remote community.”

In all five of the adult seals tested, saxitoxin was found in feces or urine, significant because they indicate higher exposure when tainted food was eaten. Two fish were sampled as well, and both turned up saxitoxin in their intestines.

At about the same time, samples being taken by researchers in the southeastern Bering Sea — the same area where the dead fur seals would have been foraging — revealed dense Alexandrium blooms, large cyst beds and extremely high prevalence of saxitoxin in fish, zooplankton, clams and worms.

Anderson, who noted that his team has already found a huge Alexandrium cyst bed near St. Paul, the seal discovery is significant for two reasons.

“The seal mortality demonstrates that dangerous levels of toxin can accumulate there and that local communities need to be careful about what they consume during certain times of the year,” he said by email.

Additionally, because scientists know that ocean currents run north from that region, “this might be yet another source of cells that can affect the Alaskan Arctic,” he said.

Lefebvre said all the evidence about the seals’ bodies, the fish samples and the environmental conditions were needed to show that the algal toxins killed the seals.

Up to now, it has not been possible to prove such a strong link between saxitoxin and marine mammal deaths, she said.

Mammals poisoned by saxitoxin are likely to disappear while at sea, she said. “They become paralyzed. They’re going to basically suffocate, not even drown, not even taking a breath of air, of water,” she said. “They’re going to just stop breathing.”

That contrasts with effects of a different type of algal toxin that, since the 1990s, has caused mass strandings and deaths since 1990 of marine mammals in California. That toxin, domoic acid, is produced by the Pseudo-nitzschia algae. Rather than causing paralysis, it overstimulates the nervous system, causing seizures that can result in death.

Lefebvre and others have documented thousands of cases of domoic acid poisoning among marine mammals in California, including sea lions, dolphins, seals, and whales, with animals easily seen by people on the beach. Mass die-offs of seabirds have also been documented.

So far, there have been no domoic acid poisoning cases documented in Alaska, though Lefebvre and her colleagues have consistently found low levels of it in various marine mammal species.

But a new study suggests that continued warming may make domoic acid a future problem in Alaska. The study, also led by Lefebvre, found that bowhead whales hunted over a two-decade period carried higher levels of both saxitoxin and domoic acid in years when waters were warm and sea ice was low.

Saxitoxin risks in various wild foods?

For now, saxitoxin and the paralytic shellfish poisoning it causes remain the main algal toxin concern in Alaska.

Among people, there were 132 reports of paralytic shellfish poisoning between 1993 to 2021, with the highest prevalence in Southeast Alaska and the Kodiak Archipelago, according to a bulletin published in 2022 by the Department of Health’s epidemiology section. The last fatal case concerned a person who ate shellfish at Unalaska Island.

Information about saxitoxin poisoning in wildlife has been more difficult to pinpoint.

In past years, it was suspected in some marine mammal deaths in Alaska, but it was not proven.

In the fall of 2017, four dead walruses found in the Bering Strait region had saxitoxin in their stomachs or intestines. They were among 39 walruses that, though otherwise in good body condition, were found dead in the region that August and September.

Two years later, another piece of the puzzle came when scientists retrieved clams from the Bering Strait area and the Chukchi Sea that had levels of saxitoxin above the thresholds for safe consumption by humans. That added another piece to the puzzle. Clams are an important part of the Pacific walrus diet, though the saxitoxin threshold for walruses has yet to be determined.

There are other suspected cases. For example, saxitoxin poisoning was a suggested cause of a 1987 sea otter die-off in the Kodiak Archipelago, though test results were inconclusive.

Beyond mammals, Alaska seabirds are known to have been killed by saxitoxin. That toxin caused a 2019 die-off of Arctic terns in the Juneau area; the birds had been feeding on sand lance, a type of fish known to accumulate saxitoxin.

For people in St. Paul and elsewhere in Western Alaska, who live far away from the two Alaska labs that currently test shellfish for toxins, the new information is concerning, Divine said.

St. Paul residents and others in the Pribilof Islands harvest various types of animals beyond the clams and mussels that are routinely screened for consumption safety, she said. But there is not much known yet about saxitoxin levels in the full breadth of subsistence foods, she said. “We just don’t have robust information on how much is accumulating and how things are impacted across the food web,” she said.

A grant from a NOAA program called ECOHAB funded much of the work that supported the new study. The grant for that work, which is led by Lefebvre and Anderson, runs through this year.

Anderson said the team just learned that it has been awarded ECOHAB grant funding for another year of work, part of what had been planned as a five-year follow-up program to better understand the saxitoxin risk in wild foods gathered in Indigenous subsistence harvests.

News of the one-year award is encouraging, but the scientists are worried about future years, Anderson said

The Trump administration has targeted NOAA for deep cuts, he noted. The administration is proposing to entirely terminate NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Sciences, the agency arm that supports research into algal toxins.

Termination of the National Centers for Coastal Ocean Sciences would end funding for NOAA’s entire Integrated Ocean Observing System. Within the IOOS is the Alaska Ocean Observing System, which monitors algal blooms, among other work.

Divine said the same people who have been drawn together by their concerns about toxins in the food web are also worried about the potential loss of scientific research.

“We have just an incredible amount of interest in this, and the funding that has been secured to really tackle this in a coordinated way is all on hold in this administration. And I do think that that’s worth noting,” she said.

President Donald Trump recently signed a budget bill with almost $25 billion for new Coast Guard construction, including almost $9 billion for new icebreakers and $300 million for new Coast Guard facilities in Juneau.

On Friday, Rear Adm. Bob Little, the new commander of the Coast Guard in Alaska, said it remains to be seen how those new ships will be used and when they will arrive in the Arctic.

“What I hope is, regardless of where in the service that capacity ends up, is that it will overall increase the capacity for the Coast Guard and that the Arctic District can certainly benefit from that increased capacity,” he said.

Until this month, the Coast Guard’s Alaska force was known as District 17. As part of a nationwide renaming project, it’s now the Coast Guard Arctic District. In a Juneau ceremony, Little took command of the newly renamed district from Rear Adm. Megan Dean, who has been assigned to Coast Guard headquarters in Washington, D.C.

“It’s a change in name, but our missions, our priorities remain the same,” Little said.

Alaska has the largest commercial fishing fleet in the United States and produces more than half of the nation’s seafood. Key maritime trade routes between Asia and California run through Alaska waters, and cruise ships carry more than 1.5 million passengers through Southeast Alaska each year.

Altogether, the Coast Guard employs almost 2,500 people, including almost 2,000 active-duty Sentinels, as active-duty members are formally known.

Speaking at the ceremony, the head of the Coast Guard in the Pacific Ocean, Vice Adm. Andrew Tiongson, noted that it has been an extraordinarily busy year for the agency, which responded to fishing disasters, medical emergencies, foreign ships near American waters, and the recent sinking of a cargo ship carrying 3,000 cars.

Last year, the Coast Guard responded to 16 cases of foreign ships approaching the international border near Alaska, Tiongson said, calling it “the most significant foreign military presence in our waters near Alaska … in decades.”

Tiongson, who will retire later this month, said he expects the number of foreign ships near Alaska to grow.

Both China and Russia have sailed military ships through international waters near Alaska recently as part of freedom-of-navigation missions to demonstrate their right to travel through international waterways. The United States conducts similar missions near both countries.

Foreign fishing vessels frequently catch fish near the international boundary that marks the economic activity zone between Russia and the United States.

“We have an obligation to be present and to push back, to deter or deny malign activity anywhere that we have sovereign U.S. rights, and in the Arctic District, we have a lot of those and a lot of interest,” Little said.

Right now, the big budget bill isn’t expected to bring immediate help for the Coast Guard in dealing with those issues.

The Coast Guard’s Polar Security Cutter program, which received $4.3 billion under the federal budget bill, isn’t expected to deliver its first new ship until 2030 at the earliest.

When that ship, the Polar Sentinel, arrives in service, it likely will replace the Polar Star, which was commissioned in 1976 and is primarily used to keep open the sea lanes to American research stations in Antarctica.

Additional ships are expected in the following years.

The budget bill also contains $3.5 billion for a new Arctic Security Cutter program, which seeks to launch a lighter icebreaker within three years of a contract being awarded.

That ship, according to published specifications, would only be able to break ice up to 3 feet thick, less than the capability of the Coast Guard’s sole medium icebreaker, the Healy, and equivalent to a Class-5 icebreaker, second-lowest on the six-level international standards rankings.

The bill also contains $816 million to procure additional, unspecified light and medium icebreaking cutters.

That could involve buying and converting commercial ships.

Next month, the Coast Guard is expected to commission the icebreaker Storis in Juneau. That ship was formerly the Arctic oil drilling support ship Aiviq but was purchased by the Coast Guard as an interim icebreaking solution.

Speaking Friday, Little confirmed that the Storis will be operating on a more limited basis until it undergoes a comprehensive refit.

“She’ll be transitioning from kind of an initial operating capability into what we’ll eventually consider full operational capability,” he said. “But that doesn’t diminish the fact that we’ll have a U.S. Coast Guard cutter, painted red with a Coast Guard stripe, operating in the region this summer.”

The budget bill includes $300 million to construct a new port and support facilities in Juneau to support the Storis, but Little said he didn’t have any information Friday on the timeline for construction and development.

For this summer, he said, the plan is to “limit the mission space” for the Storis until its crew and the Coast Guard are familiar with the ship.

“We’ll step into that very thoughtfully,” he said.

Friday’s ceremony didn’t include as much discussion of aviation. The budget bill includes $2.3 billion for up to 40 new MH-60 helicopters, the long-distance workhorses of Coast Guard heliborne aviation.

It also allocates $1.1 billion for six new HC-130J fixed-wing aircraft. In Alaska, five of those aircraft are based at Kodiak and used for extremely long-range search-and-rescue missions, as well as “Arctic domain” flights that can involve flights along the American border in the Arctic Ocean.

The budget bill also contains $2.2 billion for new maintenance facilities nationally, $4.4 billion for shoreside facilities — including the $300 million for Juneau — and $266 million for long-range drone aircraft, an under-developed area for the Coast Guard.

Little said that kind of spending is a “fundamental change” for the Coast Guard, whose annual budget is only about $14 billion.

Coming into his new job, he said he’s aware that as ship traffic increases in the Arctic Ocean and surrounding waters, there are “increased risks, increased commercial traffic, increased tourist traffic, cruise ships, and increased access to what were otherwise hard-to-access waters.”

The risk of a “no-notice incident that we might have to respond to — and it might be a large incident in a more remote area than we’re accustomed to operating, that would be the thing that would maybe keep you up at night.”

A draft ballot measure proposal under review by the Alaska Department of Law would decriminalize “magic mushrooms” and similar psychedelics, allowing home cultivation and personal use, as well as their use for medical and traditional reasons.

The measure does not allow commercial sale.

“For most people, their lives will not change, but for people who really need support, they may be able to find it,” said Ismail Ali, interim co-executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a national nonprofit devoted to studying psychedelic substances and advocating their safe use.

The “Alaska Natural Medicine Act” is modeled after Colorado’s Proposition 122, which was approved by voters in that state in 2022 and became effective this year. Oregon has also decriminalized the growth and use of psychedelic mushrooms.

If the Department of Law approves the measure for full-fledged signature-gathering, supporters would have to collect at least 34,099 signatures from registered voters, including specific minimums in at least 30 of 40 state House districts, in order to put the measure in front of voters.

If supporters gather the signatures before the Alaska Legislature convenes in January, the measure could be up for a vote in 2026. If the signature-gathering ends after the Legislature convenes, the measure would be subject to a vote in 2028.

The new measure is being supported by Natural Medicine Alaska, a group that submitted its initial draft with 230 signatures on June 18. In a post on social media, the group said it is attempting to get the issue on the ballot in 2026.

Members of the group did not return multiple calls and emails seeking comment.

One hundred signatures were needed to start a legal review, a prerequisite before full signature gathering begins. The review, usually a formality, is expected to finish by Aug. 17.

The text of the ballot measure states that it would no longer be a crime to possess, use, display, store or transport “fungi containing psilocybin or psilocyn, psilocybin or psilocyn in extract or other concentrated form, or plants or fungi capable of producing psilocybin, psilocyn, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), or mescaline (except from Peyote).”

The possession or use of those psychoactive chemicals would be restricted to people at least 21 years old.

Personal cultivation would be restricted to an area no more than 12 feet wide by 12 feet long.

The sale or trading of personally cultivated psychoactive fungi would be prohibited, and public consumption would still be banned.

In many ways, the measure would legalize practices that already happen quietly in Alaska.

“There’s millions and millions of Americans who use psychedelics every year, and most of the time that goes off without a hitch, and people don’t even know about it,” Ali said.

He said Alaska’s proposed ballot measure is similar to the one enacted by Colorado but also takes into account subsequent rulemaking by that state.

In addition to permitting personal use and setting up a regulatory system for medical use, the measure also creates a third channel of regulation, for traditional, Indigenous use of psychedelics.

“This is the first time that I’ve seen an advocacy group that includes a number of Native leadership and people who are not just geographically local, but also of the Indigenous tribes there,” Ali said.

Alaska setting up a way to allow and regulate traditional use of psychedelic substances is something new, he said.

“I find that really beautiful and really ambitious, because it is something that comes up a lot, and it’s sort of like direct Indigenous to Indigenous conversation, which is happening increasingly in other states as well,” he said.

Psychedelic mushrooms remain a Schedule I drug and illegal under federal law, except for clinical research, but Colorado, Oregon and more than a dozen cities have decriminalized them.

In those places, federal officials have not prosecuted people and businesses that use psychoactive substances, which has allowed individual states to experiment with different ways to regulate and use them, Ali said.

There is growing interest in psychoactives’ ability to treat people with depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.  Clinical studies have found varied results, and additional research is underway at a variety of universities and laboratories nationwide.

In 2024, the Alaska Legislature voted to create a task force to draft recommendations for psychedelic medicines if approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

That task force released draft recommendations in May.

Because the FDA rejected an initial psychedelic medicine application, those recommendations have never been implemented. In addition, the task force did not consider personal, recreational use as proposed by the ballot measure.

Currently, only one ballot measure — proposing new limits on financial contributions to candidates for public office — has been approved for the 2026 ballot. A second measure, seeking to repeal Alaska’s ranked choice voting system, is gathering signatures and is expected to garner enough support to also appear on the 2026 ballot.

If it does so, it will be the third time in six years that Alaskans have voted on the issue of ranked choice voting.

A small creek on Alaska’s Little Kiska Island has been renamed, more than 80 years after it was named after Germany’s Nazi Party by World War II soldiers fighting in the Aleutians.

Nazi Creek was the last landmark in the United States to bear the Nazi name. Its new name is Kaxchim Chiĝanaa, meaning either “gizzard creek” or “creek or river belonging to gizzard island” in Unangam Tunuu, the language of the Indigenous Unangax̂ people.

On Thursday, the Domestic Names Committee of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names voted 17-0 to approve the new name, without discussion.

The board’s decision allows the federal government to officially change the creek’s name in federal databases that are the official repository of geographic names. That repository is used by federal agencies and commercial companies that provide maps to the general public.

The board also approved the renaming of nearby “Nip Hill,” named by soldiers using a derogatory term for Japanese people. That hill was renamed “Kaxchim Qayaa,” or “gizzard hill,” again using the traditional name for Little Kiska Island, which is not far from Kiska Island, site of a World War II battle.

Michael Livingston, an employee of the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association, has been working for almost two years to have the names changed. Moses Dirks, an expert on Unangam Tunuu, recommended the new names.

“I think that’s pretty awesome. I think elders … and others are happy about it. It really should have never been there in the first place,” Livingston said of Thursday’s vote.

“Like one of my teachers … used to say, if you know something that can make our community better, our villages better, be brave and stand up and say something about it, do something about it,” Livingston said.

The new names were previously recommended by the Alaska Historical Commission, which considered them in April. The changes were endorsed by local Native tribes and Native corporations, the Museum of the Aleutians, the manager of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, Congregation Beth Sholom of Anchorage, and the Alaska Chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League, among others.

Kiska Island is located 242 miles west of Adak, at the far end of the Aleutian Islands. The area has been mostly uninhabited since World War II, when invading Japanese forces took 42 people on Attu Island prisoner. More than half died in Japanese internment camps.

The United States forcibly relocated almost 900 Unangax̂ residents of the Aleutian Islands, housing them in unsuitable internment camps in Southeast Alaska and elsewhere. Many became sick and died from the conditions imposed by the government.

Aleutian Islands residents subsequently received reparations from the federal government under legislation that also paid reparations to Japanese Americans also interned during the war.

Livingston’s work isn’t yet complete. He’s also seeking to rename Quisling Cove, a small body of water named after the Norwegian Nazi collaborator Vidkun Quisling. That name change remains pending.

People who might have been exposed to radiation from atomic weapons tests conducted in the Aleutians half a century ago have extra time to apply for compensation from a federal program, under the sweeping tax and budget bill passed by Congress and signed into law last week.

The bill, which was signed by President Donald Trump on July 4, includes a provision reviving the Radiation Compensation Exposure Act, which was enacted in 1990.

The act’s compensation system distributed one-time payments to people who were exposed to radiation from the weapons tests and who later were diagnosed with certain types of cancer. The program has distributed about $2.7 billion to date, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

While most of the tests covered by the act were conducted in Nevada, the program also covers health damages from underground weapons tests conducted on Alaska’s Amchitka Island in 1965, 1969 and 1971.

The program covers former uranium mine workers, as well, many of whom were Navajo Nation members.

The compensation program had been on track to expire, with a previous deadline of June 10, 2024, for any new claims.

The budget bill extends the deadline for new claims to Dec. 31, 2027, and it sets a Dec. 31, 2028, sunset date for the trust fund that administers the claims.

The bill also raises compensation amounts. For “downwinders,” people who were not on site at the time of the tests but may have been exposed to radiation carried by the wind, the compensation is hiked from $50,000 to $100,000. For on-site workers, the compensation is raised from $75,000 to $100,000.

Of the Alaska weapons tests, the third — called Cannikin — was the most controversial.

It was the biggest underground nuclear test ever conducted by the United States. The tested bomb was 5 megatons, about 250 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. There was widespread opposition to the project, including from environmentalists who later founded the organization Greenpeace.

Legal opposition to the test went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ultimately allowed the project to proceed.

The test created what was the equivalent of a magnitude 7 earthquake, killing up to 2,000 sea otters and thousands of fish.

The island continues to undergo environmental monitoring, for which the U.S. Department of Energy is responsible. The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation and the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association, a tribal organization, are partners.