Federal Government

Last July, Dan Ruthrauff was on the North Slope with colleagues, outfitting black brant with metal leg bands. It was the sort of thing he did year after year as a federal research biologist.

He wishes he was still working as a federal scientist, adding to the knowledge of Alaska shorebirds, migration patterns and reproductive ecology.

But Ruthrauff is now listed as a former employee of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Alaska Science Center. His last official day at the office was in mid-April. It’s not how Ruthrauff wanted to end his 24-year career.

“I had a lot of irons in the fire, and many projects that I was still working on,” he said. “And I, you know, am lamenting the fact that those aren’t going to be able to happen.”

He’s among about 10 colleagues who quit in mid-April, out of 62 people who worked in his USGS ecosystems unit.

Across Alaska, hundreds of federal employees are losing their jobs. Diminishing the federal workforce is a central goal of President Trump’s, and a hallmark of the first 100 days of Trump’s second term. Alaska is especially reliant on federal jobs. While the loss is hitting home for some Alaskans now, it’ll be months before we can quantify that impact.

Ruthrauff considers himself lucky, compared to some of his colleagues. With the so-called “Fork in the Road” incentives, he could retire early without penalty. He feels for the co-workers who had to leave under less favorable terms. And he’s sad for the science that won’t be completed.

“We believe in what we do, and we believe in the value that we bring to the public,” he said. “So when that started being denigrated and undervalued, it became really difficult, and it’s been a lot of anxiety at work as we started to recognize that lack of appreciation for this very basic research.”

USGS is part of the Department of Interior, which is one of the largest components of Alaska’s federal workforce. In total, about 15,000 Alaskans worked for the federal government when Trump took office this year. No one can yet say how many have since been fired, or took incentives to quit or retire.

“That has been a big question, a gaping question,” said Brock Wilson, assistant professor of economics at the Institute of Social and Economic Research, part of the University of Alaska Anchorage.

“What everyone wants to know is the magnitude” of the job losses, he said. “And that has been really challenging to make any firm conclusion about.”

The state of Alaska says more than 230 federal workers have filed unemployment claims. Those might be some of the 1,400 probationary workers in Alaska. Probationary workers were among the first targeted for firing.

But Wilson cautions that the number of unemployment claims aren’t all that telling, since some of the probationary workers were rehired, some fired a second time, and some continued to receive pay for a time despite getting emails saying they’d been fired. Wilson says that’s just one moving piece that confuses the federal employment picture. Another, he says, is that people who took the Fork in the Road incentives are on different path.

“In fact, they may have gotten another job elsewhere, and so you wouldn’t see that movement in unemployment,” he said.

The best indicator, Wilson said, will be payroll data – how many Alaskans receive federal paychecks now compared to a year prior. The government releases those figures about half a year after the fact, so it will be a few months before we know how much the Trump administration has shrunk Alaska’s federal workforce.

As for the remaining researchers at the Alaska Science Center, more job losses are likely. The journal Science reports that the White House is expected to ask Congress to defund the entire biological research program at the U.S. Geological Survey. The Project 2025 blueprint, which the Trump administration is largely following, calls for abolishing it and obtaining “necessary scientific research about species of concern” from universities by competitive bid.

Ruthrauff, the biologist studying birds, said he’s pretty sure the agency will discontinue his work.

“In the short term, for sure it’s just not going to happen. We don’t have the bodies to do it,” he said. “And if the 2026 budget is any indication, there literally won’t be the organization to do it.”

Some of his colleagues work on species with obvious economic value to Alaska, like salmon, and Ruthrauff said bird-watching and hunting add to Alaska’s economy. Beyond that, he said, “birds bring all of us joy.”

The data he’s collected over his career is archived. He hopes future scientists will one day use it to help maintain healthy bird populations.

One of Alaska’s most prolific climate communicators could lose his job if the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration go through. 

The Trump administration laid out a plan to slash NOAA’s budget in a memo leaked this month. The draft cuts would eliminate several research institutes the agency funds in Alaska, including the Fairbanks-based Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy, or ACCAP.

That’s where Rick Thoman works. He’s a climate specialist who is known as the state’s go-to source for weather information. He hosts weekly radio spots for communities across the state and writes a blog covering timely topics like extreme weather, seasonal outlooks and ice conditions.

But Thoman’s salary is funded entirely by NOAA, and three-quarters of that is through the base funding that ACCAP receives from the Oceanic and Atmospheric Research office that would be terminated if the cuts become a reality. 

He said cutting his interpretive services would leave Alaskans in the dark.

“The weather doesn’t care whether we’re forecasting it or interpreting it or anything,” he said. “It’s going to happen. But we will be in a much, I think, reduced position to prepare for it and respond to it.”

John Davies is a retired seismologist and former state legislator in Fairbanks. He said he relies on Thoman’s reports as an avid gardener. 

“Right now, we’re making a decision about when we should put our plants out in the greenhouse, and we’re trying to anticipate when we’re going to put plants in the ground.”

Davies also built his own home, and said that he used the climate information Thoman compiles to figure out how much insulation and fuel he’d need to stay warm. He said that the long-range climate data Thoman makes accessible to the public is invaluable.

Staff at NOAA’s Juneau offices and the White House declined to comment. Final funding decisions will be made when Congress votes on a budget in the coming months.

The Trump administration has changed course and is reversing the termination of international student records, which had put thousands of students across the country at risk for deportation.

University of Alaska officials confirmed Monday that the four impacted UA students now have restored status in the federal Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or SEVIS.

Immigration lawyer Margaret Stock represented one of the students. She said the actions of the Trump administration were illegal, and she thinks the administration buckled under the pressure of dozens of lawsuits filed in response.

“They were playing some kind of game where they figured people would self-deport or they just wouldn’t react fast enough,” Stock said. “But the legal community rallied pretty quickly, and it was so blatantly illegal that it was easy to win a lawsuit. So people were just filing lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit and getting temporary restraining orders immediately.”

The move from the federal government comes amid a crackdown from President Trump on immigration.

Jean Kashikov, a recent University of Alaska Anchorage graduate, was among many students who sued the government and argued that it terminated their SEVIS records without due process, in violation of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Kashikov is from Kazakhstan and studied aviation and mathematics in Anchorage. He received his termination notice as he was doing his optional practical training, which allows foreign students to work in the country for up to a year, if they are working in their field of study. He was self-employed as a flight instructor in Wasilla.

Cindy Woods, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska, represented Kashikov. She said she was notified that Kashikov’s record was restored Monday morning.

“He has status again to be here in the United States and to continue with his optional practical training period,” Woods said. “So he can get back to flight instructing and continuing to earn the hours he needs to launch his career as a pilot.”

In announcing the reversal Friday, attorneys with the Justice Department said the federal government is working on a framework to legally terminate SEVIS records.

The Trump administration’s National Energy Dominance Council is planning an Alaska summit with leaders from Japan and South Korea in early June to discuss the Alaska LNG project.

That’s according to reports from the New York Times and Reuters citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter. The White House, the Energy Department and the Interior Department all declined to confirm the summit reportedly scheduled for June 2 in emails to Alaska Public Media.

The White House and the Energy Department each emailed identical statements touting the potential benefits of the project and saying the administration was “committed” to supporting the Alaska LNG project.

“Unlike the previous administration which openly discouraged investment in American LNG, President Trump and (Energy) Secretary (Chris) Wright are committed to expanding American energy infrastructure, including by supporting the Alaska LNG Project,” White House and Energy Department spokespeople said.

The $44 billion, 800-mile Arctic gasline project would connect North Slope natural gas fields with a liquefaction facility and export terminal in Southcentral Alaska. But for decades, the Alaska LNG project has failed to attract enough investors to make the complex and expensive project a reality, leaving trillions of cubic feet of natural gas stranded without a market.

Since returning to office, Trump has repeatedly said the gasline project is a priority for his administration. The state agency working towards the gasline project signed an agreement last month with developer Glenfarne to bring the project towards a final investment decision. That’s expected late this year.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy traveled to Asia earlier this year to seek foreign investors for the gasline. He returned with a nonbinding letter of intent saying Taiwanese state energy company CPC Corp. would purchase gas from the project. But the governor did not return with commitments from enough partners to allow the project to move forward.

The ramped-up gasline push comes as countries seek to avoid high tariffs from the Trump administration.

The reports from the Times and Reuters say federal officials hope to use the summit to announce commitments from Japan and South Korea to purchase gas from the project. Trade talks with Japan and South Korea are underway, and Japan has floated increasing LNG imports as an element of a potential trade deal. But the Korean industry minister told Reuters he was not aware of any plans to announce a commitment from South Korea.

Alaska could lose several research institutions and a pipeline into science for budding researchers in the state if the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s budget become a reality. 

“Even the possibility of the disruption is affecting the students and the researchers,” said Joshua Hostler, a Ph.D. student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. His research group met this week to discuss if they’d apply for a new federal funding opportunity. Because of the uncertainty, they probably won’t.

“Even if they do approve the funding, are they going to take it away later?” Hostler said.

He said that groups across the university system have been easing up on submitting research proposals for the same reason. 

The Trump administration proposed to slash the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s budget by about 27% and eliminate climate research in a memo leaked this month. The draft cuts would terminate funding for several research institutes that rely on the agency to finance their work in Alaska. Among those on the chopping block are the Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, and Ecosystem Studies (CICOES), the Alaska Ocean Observing System, Alaska Sea Grant, the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy and the Kachemak Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve. 

The institutions share projects, faculty and student researchers with the University of Alaska so the state can understand and adapt to climate change while training the next generation of in-state experts.

Hostler is currently developing a seasonal lightning forecast system to help wildfire managers in Alaska plan for the upcoming fire season. Lighting strikes most in Interior Alaska, and that’s where the biggest wildfires in the state happen. Hostler is using machine learning models to predict the intensity of lightning a season in advance, so fire managers know where to put their resources. 

But he’s funded by a NOAA grant from the Oceanic and Atmospheric Research office that would be eliminated under the draft cuts, and he applied for the grant with help from CICOES, which would also be cut. The funds cover Hostler’s wages of $29 per hour.

“Without that funding, I just wouldn’t be able to pay my rent,” he said. “I’d have to stop doing the research that I’m doing now and I’d have to go get a job somewhere.”

Hajo Eicken heads the International Arctic Research Center at UAF. He said these NOAA-funded institutes have helped create a pipeline for students to develop research in Alaska and then have opportunities to continue working here after graduating.

“These students, in particular, the Ph.D. students, they’re at the cutting edge of the field,” he said. “They help us respond much more effectively to various opportunities and challenges that we’re facing in Alaska.”

CeCe Borries-Strigle, a Ph.D. student at UAF who is set to finish her degree this summer, was planning to stay at the university for another year as a post-doctoral researcher to finish her work improving fire weather forecasts in the state. But, like Hostler, that project would be funded through a NOAA office and a research institute that may soon cease to exist.

Borries-Strigle is based in Kenai and was there in 2019 when the Swan Lake Fire jumped Sterling Highway and smoke choked the region for several months. She said she wants to stay in Alaska working on wildland fire research, but might have to change those plans due to funding uncertainty. 

“I think there’s going to be a huge generation of scientists that miss out on more early career training because the funding is not there,” she said. “Those jobs aren’t there.”

At Kachemak Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve in Homer, 10 college students participate in community-driven research projects each year. Katherine Schake manages the reserve and said that past students have gone on to manage invasive European green crab with the Metlakatla Indian Community, track fish stocks at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and been hired on to continue freshwater research at the reserve. 

The reserve receives more than $800,000 per year from NOAA, and a 30% match from the University of Alaska Anchorage. That covers facilities and half of the staff’s salaries, Schake said. Without the base NOAA funds, she said that the staff would likely drop from 10 to four, and they wouldn’t be able to continue mentoring students.

One key service that students help with in Alaska is collecting data at sea. Seth Danielson leads an oceanography lab at UAF. His team tracks ocean conditions such as the temperature, nutrient content and salinity off the coast of Alaska over long time periods. That data, which shows how the seas are changing, feeds into how fisheries are managed.

“So NOAA develops the ecosystem status report for the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council every fall, and the council uses the assessments of ocean conditions as they set harvest levels for next year’s catch limits,” Danielson said. “So not all that data is collected only by NOAA — some of it’s collected by university researchers like us.”

More than 60% of Danielson’s funding comes from NOAA through the Alaska Ocean Observing System, one of the institutes that would be closed under the proposal. If that happens, he says he would probably have to lay off four of his five staff members. 

He’d lose more than staff. Last August, his team moored half a million dollars worth of equipment to the bottom of the ocean. To get the data it’s been collecting all year, they need funding to sail out there and retrieve it. 

“So not only is the data at risk and the students who are relying on that data for their graduate research, but the equipment itself is at risk — the batteries don’t last forever,” he said. 

If the batteries die before Danielson can secure funding for the expedition, all of the data would be lost.

In Juneau, Curry Cunningham runs a fisheries lab through UAF. He estimates that NOAA pays for at least 30% of his research and staff, and said that the bleak funding outlook means he’s planning to scale back the number of graduate students and research projects he’ll take on in the future.

Right now, Cunningham oversees six graduate students and four post-graduate researchers. Three of them are working on NOAA-funded projects. 

“A lot of the job opportunities that may have been available in the recent past are unlikely to be available for some of our students as they exit our program,” he said.  

The proposed cuts come as UAF has set a goal to become one of the top-tier research institutions in the nation, called R1 status. To qualify, the university needs to award an average of 70 doctorates per year. Laura Conner is vice chancellor for research at UAF. She said that roughly a quarter of the university’s operating budget comes from the federal government, and graduate researchers rely on federal dollars.

“It’s likely that large decreases in federal support could impact R1,” Conner said.  

But, she said it’s hard to predict how it will play out and UAF is still hopeful it can achieve the status. 

Even so, she said that a deep cut to NOAA funding, “will have a chilling effect on research across the nation, more generally.”

Staff at NOAA’s Juneau offices and the White House declined to comment, and final funding decisions have not yet been made. 

Editor’s note: This story was reported and published by the Anchorage Daily News. It is republished here with permission. 

As the Trump administration works to end nearly all federal support for public broadcasting in the United States, the loss of that money for the state’s 27 public radio stations and four public TV stations could jeopardize remote Alaskans’ access to community connections and local and national news, and public safety, station managers across the state said this week.

Earlier this month, national news outlets reported that the White House drafted a memo asking Congress to rescind $1.1 billion in funds to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — a nonprofit that Congress appropriates taxpayer dollars to for public media nationwide — for about the next two years. The memo leaves intact $100 million allocated for emergency communications, The New York Times reported. The unpublished memo — expected to be presented once Congress reconvenes Monday — gives Congress 45 days to approve the cuts or restore the spending, NPR reported.

President Donald Trump’s administration has called public media — particularly NPR and PBS — “a waste” of taxpayer dollars, saying it produces “radical, woke propaganda” with “zero tolerance for non-leftist viewpoints,” according to a White House statement Monday. Americans spend an average of $1.60 per year on public broadcasting through taxes, according to CPB.

While NPR receives 1% of its funding directly from the federal government, its close to 300 member stations rely on a much greater percentage, according to NPR. That includes stations across Alaska, which report they’re already strained without state funding. Gov. Mike Dunleavy has vetoed state funding toward public broadcasting each fiscal year since 2019.

“In many parts of Alaska — and communities throughout the country — public media is often the only locally operated, locally controlled broadcasting service,” said Ed Ulman, president and CEO of Alaska Public Media, in testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability in Washington, D.C., in March. “We are more than nice to have. We are essential, especially in remote and rural places where commercial broadcasting cannot succeed.”

Although Alaska has fewer public television stations — KAKM in Anchorage, KTOO in Juneau, KYUK in Bethel and KUAC in Fairbanks — they receive higher levels of federal funding compared to radio, Ulman said. That’s because television costs more to produce, and has a wider reach.

In Bethel, KYUK’s main radio broadcast reaches about 13,500 predominantly Yup’ik residents throughout the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in Southwest Alaska. Between their television and radio station, federal funding makes up about 70% of KYUK’s operating budget each year, said Kristin Hall, interim general manager.

“I would avoid closing at all costs, but that would mean a drastic change in our operations,” Hall said of a potential stop in federal allocations. KYUK currently broadcasts local news in English and Yup’ik three times a day with a news team of three full-time reporters, and a few part-time editors, translators and multimedia team members. Hall said the station’s robust coverage of a region roughly the size of South Dakota “wouldn’t be as realistic” without the funding to support it.

KCAW in Sitka depends on federal funding to power about 30% of its annual budget, said manager Mariana Robertson.

Most of it helps pay to maintain specialized radio equipment that allows the station to stay on air and transmit information to eight communities throughout Southeast Alaska in the event of power loss.

“We’ve had a fatal landslide here in Sitka, we’ve had so many warnings, and so those are the kind of instances in which we really want to be on the air, sharing information with our community,” Robertson said. “That’s the investment in public safety (and) in our communities that the government is making when it funds through CPB funds.”

In the absence of federal funds, Robertson said the station will seek philanthropic support to try to make up the difference. Already, donor contributions make up 40% of their budget.

“We’re really asking our community for so much already, so we’re going to look to other sources of philanthropy,” Robertson said. “But really, we need this money.”

Juneau’s public radio and television station, KTOO, will be losing about a third of its budget, said General Manager Justin Shoman. Some employees traveled to Washington, D.C., in February to talk with lawmakers, and KTOO has posted a “Federal Funding” page on its website to communicate to listeners and members about the impact of a loss of funding, he said.

“We are trying to be very proactive in our approach to influencing this decision from an organizational perspective,” Shoman said.

In Utqiagvik, KBRW General Manager Jeff Seifert said that the loss of 40% of the station’s budget — the amount filled by CPB funding — could eventually mean lights out for their already bare-bones, roughly five-person operation.

“I’m thinking we could survive maybe two years,” Seifert said, referring to the station’s “nest egg” savings. “But everything is so expensive up here, there’s just no way to make up for that kind of a loss. Just keeping the lights on is hugely expensive. Probably we’d reduce our services to almost nothing.”

For a station like KBRW, which serves seven additional villages and Prudhoe Bay in an area that spans 95,000 square miles, people rely on the radio for everything from birthday wishes called in by a loved one, to local government meetings, to weather reports that could save lives, Seifert said.

“Right now is our spring whaling,” Seifert said. “Our whalers are out on the edge of the ice. They keep KBRW on 24 hours a day.” For company and entertainment, sure, but also for wind condition reports that inform how the sea ice might move and crack, he said.

Many of Alaska’s rural radio stations are the main source of local news in their area.

KUCB in Unalaska, a station that would lose about 40% of its budget if Congress moves forward with the Trump administration’s proposal, is one of them, said General Manager Lauren Adams.

“We’re the only ones providing news here in Unalaska, with reporters who live here year-round,” she said. Federal cuts would inevitably force staff reductions, which would decrease local reporting and change how KUCB sounds, she said.

“We would probably be more of a repeater station than a local station,” Adams said. “We would basically run local as often as possible, but a lot of our content would not come from Alaska.”

Most radio stations in Alaska have already received the federal funding that will carry them through the end of the federal fiscal year, which runs through September, Seifert said.

But a challenge is drafting a budget now that will take effect July 1, with unreliable funding sources, Seifert said:

“We’re kind of lost as to, how do you do a budget when you don’t know where 40% of the money is going to come from?”