Alaska Public Media

A coalition of schools and advocacy groups, including the Anchorage School District, is suing the Trump administration over its decision to withhold some $6.8 billion in federal education funds approved by Congress.

“When longstanding commitments are withheld without warning, it creates instability across our schools and directly impacts the students who depend on these programs the most,” Anchorage School District spokesperson Corey Allen Young said in an emailed statement.

The Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget has said it’s withholding the funds pending a review. OMB and the Education Department did not respond to emails seeking comment.

The plaintiffs, which also include the Fairbanks North Star Borough and the Kuspuk School District in Western Alaska, along with school districts and teachers’ unions across the country, say the funding freeze violates federal law and the constitutional separation of powers.

“The Department provided no legal authority or timetable for its review, nor did it indicate what it was reviewing given that the statutes leave no discretion in distributing the funds,” the plaintiffs said in their complaint.

The funding approved by Congress is meant to support teacher training, migrant education, English language learning, and academic enrichment. Alaska schools received $47 million for those programs in the last fiscal year, according to the top Democrat on the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee.

In an interview, Kuspuk School District Superintendent Madeline Aguillard said her district relies heavily on federal funds. She learned June 30 that more than $180,000 in federal funding for her district was on hold.

Aguillard had already signed contracts to send students to remote areas for a summer program studying salmon populations when the news of the freeze came down, she said. Now, she’s not sure how she’ll fill the gap.

“Some of these programs are honestly the cornerstone of what we offer, what we can offer, and what we have historically offered, and now we’re talking about literally removing those cornerstones,” Aguillard said.

Anchorage has seen nearly $12 million frozen, according to the lawsuit. Young, the district spokesperson, said the freeze had caused “significant disruption to our core mission of educating all students for success in life.” The frozen funds, bolstered early literacy programs, teacher training and mental health services and supported students whose families work in logging, agriculture and fishing, he said.

Brianna Gray, executive director of student support services with Fairbanks’ school district, said the freeze of funding intended for teacher training, academic enrichment and student support would hurt students throughout the district. The Fairbanks North Star Borough School District saw $2.5 million in federal funding frozen, according to the lawsuit.

“Our teams have had to pivot and adjust programming without this dedicated funding,” she said in a statement. “There is now a clear risk for staffing impacts and program cuts.”

The plaintiffs are asking a Rhode Island federal judge to order the Trump administration to distribute the funding.

Ten Republican senators, including Sen. Lisa Murkowski, sent a letter to the administration July 16 urging it to release the money. The Trump administration said it would unfreeze some of the funds meant for after-school programs, but Gray said her district was still waiting for the money to arrive.

Federal investigators say the plane that crashed in September 2023, killing former U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola’s husband, was overloaded with cargo.

That’s according to the National Transportation Safety Board’s final report released Tuesday on the crash near St. Mary’s that resulted in the death of pilot Eugene “Buzzy” Peltola Jr., 57. Peltola was a well-respected Bethel community member who’d previously served as Alaska regional director for the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. He retired from the position to support his wife’s successful run for Congress.

According to the report, in the days before the accident, Peltola was transporting a group of hunters from Holy Cross to an airstrip near St. Mary’s, where the hunters set up camp. The hunters killed a moose, and Peltola made a series of two flights to transport the meat and other remains back to Holy Cross.

The report says the first flight on Sept. 12, 2023 was uneventful. During the second flight later that day, Peltola’s plane was ferrying about 117 more pounds of cargo than its maximum takeoff weight, or about 6% over. Additionally, Peltola had strapped the moose’s antlers to the plane’s right wing strut. While the report notes that transporting antlers in that manner isn’t unusual, it says the practice requires formal Federal Aviation Administration approval, which officials said had not been done.

The second flight took off at around 8:45 p.m. The report says that as the plane reached the end of the runway, “it pitched up and turned sharply to the right; however, rather than climbing as before, it flew behind the adjacent ridgeline and out of view.”

Hunters headed up and over the ridge, where they saw the plane had crashed. The hunters pulled Peltola from the crash site, according to the report, and one of them issued an SOS from a satellite phone. Though hunters were able to bundle Peltola in a blanket near a heater, he ultimately succumbed to wounds from the crash after about two hours. A National Guard helicopter sent from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage arrived about six hours after the crash occurred, at around 1:50 a.m. the following morning.

The report attributed the crash to Peltola operating the plane while it exceeded its maximum weight limit and installing an unapproved external load to the plane which resulted in “a loss of airplane control during takeoff into an area of mechanical turbulence and downdrafts.”

Investigators added that “there was no evidence that any of the meat had shifted in flight, and the antlers remained firmly attached to the wing strut and were not interfering with any of the flight control cables.”

Unrelated to the release of the NTSB report, Peltola’s widow, former Congresswoman Mary Peltola, filed a lawsuit Friday against the owners of the plane her husband was flying. The suit alleges negligence by hunting guide Bruce Werba and two companies under Werba’s control, which caused Gene Peltola’s death.

Thousands of Alaskans are still caught in backlogs as they try to get government benefits intended to help people facing disabilities and poverty.

That’s despite a yearslong effort by state officials to keep up with paperwork. And some say the problems will only get worse with new federal work requirements for Medicaid.

One Alaskan caught in the quagmire is Juneau resident Joy Lee.

Several times a month, Lee faces unimaginable pain.

“All of a sudden you’ve got half your mouth is a toothache, and your eyeball’s falling out of your face, and your face is on fire, and you’ve got a severe earache — but it’s not real,” she said in a recent interview.

Lee is 63. She has multiple sclerosis, a treatable, but ultimately incurable, autoimmune disease. One of her symptoms is a chronic pain condition known as trigeminal neuralgia.

For a while, she said, she could manage it. At one point, she recalled, she had to be on a work call while lying on the floor during an episode. But eventually, it got to be too much.

Lee exited the workforce in 2007, after working since the age of 14. She qualified for disability payments from Social Security. She started receiving state-administered aid from Adult Public Assistance and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

These days, from her Juneau apartment, Lee spends a lot of time keeping up with all the paperwork — saving digital files, paper backups, all her receipts. She likes to think she’s on the ball.

So Lee was shocked when the state said she wasn’t.

“I sent in all my paperwork, and then 30 days later, I got a notification saying that they didn’t get my paperwork and I was having all my benefits cut,” she said.

Lee called the Division of Public Assistance, the state agency that handles Medicaid, SNAP, Adult Public Assistance and other benefits programs.

“They looked at my paperwork and said, ‘Yeah, we’ve got all your paperwork, but it’s an automatic letter, because there’s no agents to do the cases,'” she said.

Lee called it a “paperwork nightmare.” And she’s far from alone.

It’s a problem that first gained public attention thanks to reporting by KTOO beginning in 2022. Despite court orders, lawsuits and efforts by state officials to address the issue, it persists.

Lee’s struggle is “a variation of a story that we’ve heard many times,” said Nick Feronti, an attorney with the Northern Justice Project, which has sued the state on behalf of Alaskans unable to access social safety net programs like SNAP, Medicaid and Adult Public Assistance. It’s hard to see evidence that things are improving, he said.

“They are either getting worse or maintaining, and there has not been much positive news, which is very sad for the residents of our state,” Feronti said.

Feronti feels like lawmakers and the governor haven’t prioritized eliminating the backlog, he said. He contrasted that with the attention state leaders give to the Permanent Fund Dividend.

“If our PFDs were delayed, people would be in the streets, and the executive branch of our government would take notice and fix the PFD delays right away,” he said. “But I think that because this is happening to poor people or to disabled people, they are pushed to the margins of our society, and they are neglected.”

As of the latest report on July 1, the state is only processing about half of Alaskans’ applications for SNAP benefits on time. But state officials say they are making progress — in June, the state told a federal court its SNAP backlog declined by 16%.

“I’m here every day working to solve the problem,” Division of Public Assistance Director Deb Etheridge said in an interview. “I have just an amazing group of eligibility technicians and amazing, you know, tremendous support from the commissioner’s office and the governor’s office to work towards (a) solution.”

But nearly 4,000 Alaskans are still caught in the SNAP backlog, and nearly 800 applications for the Adult Public Assistance program have languished for more than a month.

In the state’s Medicaid program, the backlog is much larger. Nearly 30,000 Alaskans are awaiting delayed decisions on their applications, according to state data provided by Feronti.

Etheridge emphasized that many stalled Medicaid applications are likely duplicates, and she said people with pending applications are still able to access medical care.

“We have a team that works with providers to receive that information and process anything that’s identified as urgent and emergent,” she said. “We’re really trying to work on all fronts.”

On average, it now takes 45 days for the state to process SNAP applications, roughly two weeks longer than federal law requires. That number has risen this year, due in part, Etheridge said, to the division’s decision to prioritize older cases.

“We want to get everybody closer to 30 days. We don’t want to have those aging,” she said.

But Etheridge says people caught in the backlog and people like Joy Lee, who are at risk of losing them, do have options. One is to file a request for what’s known as a “fair hearing.” That’s an option for anyone who’s received an adverse decision from the Division of Public Assistance, whether related to SNAP, Medicaid, heating assistance, Adult Public Assistance or something else.

The division’s call center can help people apply for fair hearings, Etheridge said. Alaskans can also request them via email.

Feronti, the attorney, said Alaskans having trouble accessing SNAP and Adult Public Assistance can contact his firm for help.

The Division of Public Assistance is also hiring aggressively and having some success filling positions, Etheridge said. But despite her best efforts, she said she’s not sure when the division will be able to catch up.

“We’re still working our way out of it, and so I would be naive to say a date,” Etheridge said.

This year’s state budget funds 15 new benefits processing jobs, but staffing levels are still roughly 20% lower than they were before lawmakers and the governor cut more than 100 positions in 2021, according to state budget documents.

Benefits processor and state employee union official Billy Stapleton Jr. said that’s the root of the problem: not enough staff.

“There’s no Band-Aid fix,” he said. “We need a permanent solution to do this job correctly, and we just simply need more workers.”

In the coming years, Stapleton said, there’s reason to believe the problem will get significantly worse as a result of Medicaid changes included in President Trump’s so-called “big, beautiful bill.” Once its provisions take effect in the coming years, it will require some Medicaid recipients to prove they’re working or volunteering — and file forms with the state twice a year rather than annually.

That means even more paperwork.

For now, Joy Lee said the Division of Public Assistance has told her she won’t be cut off. At least, not this month.

But thousands aren’t so lucky, she said. Lee wishes more Alaskans would stand up and tell their leaders it’s unacceptable, she said.

“You gauge a country by how it takes care of the least of these,” she said, referencing a passage from the Bible. “When our country all of a sudden doesn’t care about anybody … it just breaks my heart.”

An IT outage that grounded all Alaska Airlines flights Sunday night led to cancellations Monday at airports in Alaska.

Seven flights out of Alaska had been canceled as of 10 a.m. Monday: three flights between Fairbanks and Seattle and four between Anchorage and Seattle. Several flights departed late early Monday, according to the website FlightAware.

“A critical piece of multi-redundant hardware at our data centers, manufactured by a third-party, experienced an unexpected failure,” Alaska Airlines said in a statement. “When that happened, it impacted several of our key systems that enable us to run various operations.”

Terry Haines, producer of the Alaska Fisheries Report and a radio host at KMXT, lives in Kodiak and was heading home from Redding, California when the outage hit. His flight was supposed to leave SeaTac at 5 p.m. Sunday, he said.

“They rerouted me. They had me flying from Seattle to Chicago, and then from Chicago to Anchorage, and then from Anchorage to Kodiak. And I said, ‘Well, maybe I can get on the phone and change this,'” he said.

He was able to change his flight to continue to Anchorage through Seattle, but by the time he was expected to get home, it was likely to be over a day late.

According to Alaska Airlines, the outage was not caused by a cybersecurity breach, and passenger safety was not jeopardized.

Over 200 flights nationwide had been canceled since Sunday evening because of the outage, the airline said.

Alaska Airlines grounded its fleet in April 2024 for about an hour because of an issue with a system that calculates weight and balance of planes.

“We appreciate the patience of our guests whose travel plans have been disrupted,” the airlines’ Monday statement said. “We’re working to get them to their destinations as quickly as we can. Before heading to the airport, we encourage flyers to check their flight status.”

The fate of Alaska’s smaller public radio stations is in doubt after Congress passed a bill to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The House passed the bill overnight Thursday, 216-213. Alaska Congressman Nick Begich voted yes. That came less than 24 hours after the bill cleared the Senate, despite opposition from Sen. Lisa Murkowski.

Murkowski voted for several amendments from Democrats to preserve part or all of $1.1 billion for public broadcasting. All of them failed.

Conservative Republicans said they wanted to defund NPR in particular, because they consider its content too left-wing.

Murkowski then offered an amendment to just defund NPR and keep the money flowing to rural stations. That amendment failed, too, with Murkowski and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine as the only Republicans to support it.

“Even though what I offered was exactly what my colleagues were calling for,” Murkowski said. “Every time they spoke about public broadcasting in the negative they used words like, ‘It’s a radical liberal agenda.’ And their reference was not to the emergency early warning system. It was not to the children’s TV programming.”

Now, Murkowski said, she’s focused on what Alaska’s rural stations need to stay on air, and she’s not seeing a lot of opportunity. CPB is the main source of funding for many of Alaska’s 27 public radio stations and a significant contributor to Alaska Public Media’s budget, too.

“I have no surety that these small stations that provide such important connections within their community are going to be able to stay afloat,” she said.

The general managers of rural stations in Alaska have warned about that, too, though some are still holding out hope for other funding.

One source might be a $10 million fund at the Interior Department, in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, that assists tribal stations. Murkowski said a dozen Alaska stations might qualify.

“But when we’ve talked to folks over at Interior about how this is all going to work, it’s truly radio silence,” she said. “And I don’t think they’re denying us information. I think they truly do not know.”

Even if they are eligible, Murkowski said Alaska stations would have to compete with stations in other states for a share of the $10 million and can’t bank on getting any of it.

Though the Senate has now voted to claw back two years of funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the corporation still exists. Congress could appropriate new money for it to send to rural stations. Murkowski said that would be a tough sell to her Republican colleagues.

“I will just remind you of that vote that you saw last night on my amendment,” she said. “It was made very, very clear — and I don’t have the tweet in front of me, you’ve seen it — but the president said … basically, ‘Anybody who wants my endorsement, you better not support the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.'”

Murkowski said she hasn’t given up on sending money to CPB. She hopes public radio and tv supporters around the country are “going to start weighing in with their lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats, and saying, ‘Hey, how are we going to keep this alive?'”

Sen. Dan Sullivan didn’t grant an interview request to explain why he voted against Murkowski’s amendment. He has described himself in letters to constituents as a supporter of funding for public radio stations. In 2020, he accepted a “champion of public broadcasting” award from America’s Public Television Stations.

A Sullian spokeswoman said by email that Sullivan has warned for years that NPR is biased, but that he is talking to the Trump administration about finding support for rural Alaska stations.

Having cleared both chamber of Congress, the rescission bill heads to President Trump to sign into law.

Editor’s note: Alaska Public Media receives funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. This story was written and edited within the Alaska Public Media newsroom, and no Alaska Public Media executives outside the newsroom reviewed it before publication.

This story and headline have been updated to reflect the bill’s passage in the House.

The U.S. Senate has passed a bill to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and cut billions from foreign aid programs.

Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins of Maine were the only Republicans who voted no.

Before the bill passed, Murkowski offered an amendment to try to preserve grants to local stations. She read her colleagues a text she’d received from the general manager of KUCB in Unalaska after Wednesday’s 7.3 magnitude earthquake. When the tsunami sirens sounded in Unalaska, the loudspeakers directed people to tune into the local radio station, the text said, and Murkowski relayed that KUCB kept the community updated on air and social media, until the all-clear.

“They say, ‘This is the work that we do to keep Unalaska safe,’ And it’s only possible with federal funding,” Murkowski said, as the debate stretched into the wee hours of Thursday. “Mr. President, I have an amendment that protects public media.”

Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., argued that public media doesn’t play a vital role in disasters.

“I know that’s a scary situation in Alaska, but the good news is FEMA money will be there for these sort of alerts,” he said.

Murkowski’s effort failed by a vote of 51 to 47.

Sen. Dan Sullivan voted against the public media amendment and helped Republican leaders pass the $9 billion rescission package that’s a high priority for President Trump.

The bill goes next to the House, which has to vote to approve the Senate changes. The bill expires if not passed by Friday night.

Editor’s note: Alaska Public Media receives funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. No Alaska Public Media executives outside the newsroom reviewed this story before publication.