Federal Government

As the deadline for public comment approaches, the Alaska Federation of Natives is pulling out all the stops to block a national sport hunting and fishing group’s push to reform the federal subsistence board.

This comes after Safari Club International successfully petitioned the U.S. Interior and Agriculture Departments to review federal subsistence management policies.

Last month, the Interior Department announced a 60-day scoping period, or review, on federal subsistence management.

AFN held a webinar Tuesday afternoon to give Native hunters and fishers an update on the status of subsistence management in Alaska and explain why it believes the Safari Club proposals pose a serious threat to the Native subsistence way of life.

Attorney Jaelene Kookesh, a longtime legal counsel for the Sealaska native corporation, was one of the presenters. She currently is senior legal counsel at the Van Ness Feldman firm. Kookesh says many Alaska Natives were elated last week, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to take up the State of Alaska’s challenge of federal subsistence protections under the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, or ANILCA. But Kookesh says, the battle goes on.

“It’s like you can celebrate for not even for a day, maybe, but then you can say, ‘Okay, we won that, but now we have to comment on this scoping at Department of the Interior,” Kookesh said. “And Safari Club also has draft legislation that they’re pushing at Congress. to amend ANILCA. So, we’re getting hit at every arm of government, so we can’t rest, even with the win at the Supreme Court.”

Kookesh says she worries most about the Safari Club’s campaign to limit the federal subsistence board to state and federal agency heads, a move that would undo recent efforts to diversify the board.

“So you had five federal agency representatives, who obviously are not subsistence users. And so, we worked very hard to have three tribally nominated members for the Federal Subsistence Board, with real concrete knowledge of these practices. And this just happened within the past year,” Kookesh said.

The Safari Club also wants to change the make-up of the Rural Advisory Councils to give sport hunters and fishers a voice in the process, as well as require federal wildlife managers to defer to the state’s regulatory decisions.

Regina Lennox, Safari Club International’s senior legal counsel, says it is seeking these changes to make ANILCA work as Congress intended.

“I don’t think anything that we have sought in any way diminishes the potential representation of Alaska Native voices anywhere,” Lennox said.

“We’re working on behalf of hunters within the state, subsistence and non-subsistence alike, just to ensure that the federal agencies don’t overreach,” she said. “Over 60% of Alaska is federal land, and so if you have agencies that are doing the wrong thing and, stepping on the toes of the state and closing down hunting opportunity, that’s a lot of acreage that’s potentially at risk.”

The Safari Club says one of its top priorities is to protect the resources, which benefits all hunters. It claims the federal government has ignored state data in some of its management decisions to the detriment of wildlife.

AFN and other Native groups say the federal government has done a better job than the state in balancing ANILCA’s rural subsistence priority with conservation.

Kookesh says AFN’s webinar will be a good Subsistence 101 on the decades-long fight to protect subsistence.

“It’s been a battle going on for many years, but it kind of goes quiet every once in a while, and then it comes back up again,” Kookesh said. “So right now, we’re heavy in the fight again. So, hopefully, we can take some steps forward and not some steps back.”

The deadline for public comment is February 13. AFN’s Jan. 20 webinar is posted on AFN’s website.

Alaska lost about a third of its U.S. Forest Service employees in the past year due to federal staffing cuts led by the now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Before that, the agency had around 700 Alaska-based staff. This month, the agency told KTOO that 467 remain. 

Leading this workforce in flux is Jerry Ingersoll, the U.S. Forest Service’s acting regional forester for Alaska, covering both the Chugach and the Tongass National Forests. Ingersoll has worked for the Forest Service for 40 years and took on the role in November 2025. 

In this interview with KTOO’s Alix Soliman, Ingersoll talks about changes he’s leading Alaska Forest Service staff through, including the impending consolidation of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Tongass National Forest plan revision.

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Listen to this conversation:

Alix Soliman: What is your vision for this role?

Jerry Ingersoll: This is a period of change, and it is my job, I think, to keep the boat upright and the passengers in. There’s changes in national policy associated with changes in political leadership, and it’s my job as a professional civil servant, not only to implement those changes, but also to take care of the people in the communities involved.

Alix Soliman: Over the summer, USDA Secretary Rollins announced the consolidation and restructuring of the USDA, and the USDA made statements to the press that several Alaska forest offices will close. What is the timeline for that reorganization? Do you know what’s going to happen?

Jerry Ingersoll: I don’t, and that’s probably the largest piece of that answer is that I don’t know. The announcement of the Secretary’s decision and of moving forward with the reorganization has not yet come and I’ll hear about it when the rest of you do. And I’m in an Acting Regional Forester position because that’s part of this interim organization. I’m filling in until this larger reorganization takes place. Many employees left the agency over the last year, more in Alaska, even as a percentage of our organization, than in some other parts of the country. And so we’ve got people stepping up, covering for their departed colleagues.

Alix Soliman: Let’s talk about the Tongass Forest plan revision, which has been underway for a while now. Can you just go ahead and share where we are at now with the revision and what the next steps are?

Jerry Ingersoll: We expect within the next few months, maybe less than that, to publish a notice of intent to begin revision of the Tongass land management plan. As you say, that’s been anticipated for a while. So I would anticipate, after the notice of intent gets published, that we will host public meetings and engagement sessions around the Tongass — around Southeast Alaska — this spring. I’d expect that we will engage federally recognized tribal governments in government-to-government consultation. We’ve already begun that process, but we’ll do so even more as we officially launch the revision, and then we are hoping to complete the process and revise the forest plan over the next couple of years.

Alix Soliman: Some federal comment periods have been expedited. Do you expect a shorter public comment period than has happened in the past for this revision?

Jerry Ingersoll: You know, I think it’s too early to know for sure. We want to — we want to fully engage people in the development of their plan for their forest, and we don’t want to spend all of our lives on planning and not on doing. 

WASHINGTON — National Democrats cheered when former Alaska Congresswoman Mary Peltola announced on Monday that she’s challenging U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan.

Peltola, they said, gives Democrats a shot at winning a majority in the Senate.

But much more often than not, Alaska votes Republican in statewide races. Is it just wishful Democratic thinking that this race might be different?

“Alaska might be a state that has traditionally voted for Republicans, but it’s far more of an independent state than it is a hard Republican state,” said Lauren French, a senior political advisor with Senate Majority PAC, affiliated with Democrat Chuck Schumer from New York, the Senate Minority Leader. “You have people there who cross parties just looking for someone who will fight for them and represent them well in the U.S. Congress and in the U.S. Senate.”

French talked up Peltola’s attributes as a candidate and said she has a winning message, which is in part an Alaska version of “affordability,” a case Democrats are making nationwide. French cited the conventional wisdom that the president’s party tends to lose seats in Congress in midterm elections.

“You’re likely to see an election that, just by historical standards, is a little bit tougher for Republicans,” she said.

Analyst Kyle Kondik at the University of Virginia Center for Politics said 2026 is shaping up to be a good one for Democrats but that it would take a very big blue wave for Peltola to win.

“The Alaska Senate race is probably a lot more competitive now than it was before Mary Peltola got in,” he said. “I do still think that Dan Sullivan is favored.”

Kondik is managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, which rates congressional races. When Peltola announced her run, he moved the rating for the Alaska Senate seat two categories to the left, from “safe Republican” to “leans Republican.” So did The Cook Political Report. That’s one category away from “toss-up.”

Peltola proved in 2022 – twice – that she can win a statewide election in Alaska, Kondik said, despite losing her U.S. House race in 2024.

“I think even in losing, she performed fairly impressively,” he said. “Donald Trump won Alaska by 13 (percentage) points. She lost in the final ranked choice voting allocation to now-Rep. Nick Begich by about two and a half points.”

(Peltola ultimately lost ground in the rankings. With just first choices counted, Peltola lagged Begich by about only two percentage points).

Peltola’s 2024 “overperformance” – meaning she got more votes in Alaska than the Democrat at the top of the ticket, presidential candidate and then-Vice President Kamala Harris – is important, Kondik said. It shows a significant number of Alaskans who voted for Trump also voted for Peltola.

Peltola will need that crossover appeal to succeed this year, Kondik said.

“And I do think Peltola has a fighting chance to win, even though I think you’d generally rather be the Republican nominee in a state like Alaska,” he said.

As Kondik sees it, Sullivan is a mainstream Republican without baggage, and in Alaska, that gives him a leg up.

Alaska pollster Ivan Moore, who’s worked for Democrats, points to a different metric he finds significant.

“Seven percent more Alaskans like Mary than like Dan,” he said.

Moore’s firm, Alaska Survey Research, asks Alaskans four times a year whether they have a positive or negative view of various political figures, including Peltola and Sullivan. Since Peltola became known statewide in 2022, Moore has found her “positives” to be consistently higher than Sullivan’s. Moore said it’s a simple measure that matters.

“It’s about who you like,” he said. “You generally tend not to vote for people that you don’t like.”

But likeability is not the whole story. Moore also found that 10% of people who said they didn’t like Sullivan also said they’d vote for him. That could be because they prefer Republicans or because they like Trump, and Sullivan aligns himself with the president.

How Alaskans feel about Trump, Moore said, is tied to how they feel about Sullivan.

“And so his numbers will rise and fall based on Trump’s fortunes,” he said.

Sullivan’s campaign spokesman, Nate Adams, said Team Sullivan remains confident of the senator’s re-election. Adams, who has access to internal polling that hasn’t been made public, doesn’t think much of the idea that the election is a referendum on Trump, or that Sullivan’s fate is linked to Trump’s popularity.

“I think Alaska is still very much a state that is a lot more complex than ‘red team and blue team,'” he said.

Amid the substantial national attention Peltola generated with her launch, Sullivan’s campaign has been highlighting prominent Alaskans endorsing the Republican incumbent.

“You know, Alaska Native leaders, trades, unions,” Adams said. “There are more of these forthcoming, but these are groups and coalitions that have traditionally backed Mary in her previous races, who, on Day 1 – if not before and certainly in the days after – have decided to support Sen. Sullivan.”

One thing everyone is certain of: National groups on both sides will raise and spend boatloads of money trying to win Alaska’s U.S. Senate seat.

WASHINGTON — Sen. Lisa Murkowski was among a group of senators who met with the foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland Wednesday, trying to provide an assurance that they couldn’t get from the White House: That Greenland is safe from a U.S. military incursion.

“I think it’s important to send the message that here in the Congress, we recognize and support the sovereignty of the people of Greenland,” Murkowski, the sole Republican in the meeting, told reporters afterward.

President Trump continues to say that the United States must take Greenland, for strategic purposes.

Murkowski and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., co-sponsored a bill this week to prohibit the administration from spending any funds to “blockade, occupy, annex or otherwise assert control” over Greenland or the territory of any NATO ally.

“This is a message that I think it’s very clear, and very strong,” Murkowski said. “And, quite honestly, one that I never thought I would have to author and introduce into the United States Congress.”

Murkowski didn’t say whether any other Republicans agreed to support the bill, though Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., gave a speech on the Senate floor Wednesday saying an aggressive move on Greenland would be a calamity and gain the United States nothing.

He, like Murkowski, say seizing Greenland would shatter the NATO alliance.

Murkowski said it’d be better if the president changes his rhetoric on his own, without Congress having to pass her bill.

“I hope it’s ultimately not necessary,” she said. “But we are operating in times where we’re having conversations about things that we never thought even possible.”

Whether Congress has any appetite to rein in the president is unclear.

Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, said the legislative branch isn’t living up to its constitutional duty to check and balance presidential authority.

“Congress has abdicated its power, largely,” King said. “I’d say it’s the seventh inning. We’re behind four to three, but the game isn’t over.”

Minutes after he said that, the Senate voted to reject a resolution that would have curtailed Trump’s future use of military force in Venezuela.

Alaska’s senators, as expected, split on the issue. Murkowski, like King and all the Senate Democrats, supported the resolution, which would have required Trump to seek Congressional approval for further military action. Sen. Dan Sullivan opposed it.

The vote in the Senate on whether to block the measure was 50-50, requiring Vice President J.D. Vance to cast the tie-breaker.

Alaska’s congressional delegation introduced legislation Wednesday that aims to reduce bycatch in parts of southwest Alaska using better marine data, technology and gear.

The Bycatch Reduction and Research Act, introduced by U.S. Sens. Dan Sullivan, Lisa Murkowski and Congressman Nick Begich, would address research gaps in environmental data and improve monitoring of fisheries in the Bering Sea, Aleutian Islands and Gulf of Alaska. It would also establish a fund for fishermen to purchase updated technology and trawl gear to limit seafloor contact and bycatch. That’s when harvesters accidentally catch species they’re not targeting.

The proposed legislation builds on recommendations from the federal Alaska Salmon Research Task Force, which concluded in 2024 and aimed to better understand how humans cause declines in fish and crab species, including through factors like bycatch.

The legislation would revive the salmon task force under the new name of the Bycatch Reduction and Research Task Force. The group would review National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research on Alaska salmon and trawl gear impacts on the seafloor, and provide recommendations for future research.

“In recent years, Alaskans have witnessed unprecedented declines among some fish and crab species in parts of the state while, in other parts, runs have been strong and historic,” Sullivan said in a press release. “We need to get to the bottom of all potential causes of this increased variability, including concerns about bycatch and trawl gear habitat impacts, to strengthen the sustainability of our fisheries.”

For years, fisheries stakeholders have debated if and how fishing gear types, especially trawl gear, impacts marine species and seafloor habitats. Conservation and tribal groups and various stakeholders have pushed fisheries managers to take stronger action on limiting both bycatch and seafloor contact in trawling.

Representatives in the trawl industry have supported stricter regulations around bycatch, but also cautioned that more extreme limitations could be burdensome to the massive pollock industry, which is a major economic driver to some Western Alaska communities, including Unalaska.

The regional council that manages Alaska’s federal fisheries will discuss chum salmon bycatch management at its upcoming meeting in early February.

The proposed legislation still has to pass both the Senate and House before it would go to the president to be signed into law.

Some of Alaska’s largest pollock processors are abandoning a foreign worker visa program that once supplied up to half their workforce, citing rising costs and uncertainty under stricter immigration policies.

Tom Enlow is the president and CEO of UniSea Seafoods, Unalaska’s largest seafood processor. He said the company is moving away from the H-2B visas to save money on an inconsistent system.

“The H-2B program, I think was good for Alaska at a time when we really needed them, you know, during the pandemic, and little bit pre-pandemic, but really it’s cost prohibitive to bring workers all the way from Eastern Europe to Alaska,” Enlow said.

The H-2B visa program allows employers to bring foreign workers to the U.S. to fill temporary non-agricultural jobs during shortages. The visas can be difficult to obtain. Companies have to first show they can’t fill the jobs, then they have to apply, and then the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Labor issue the visas through a lottery system.

Enlow said the processing plant moved back to a 100% domestic workforce this summer and will do the same for the upcoming “A” season — a major pollock season that starts later this month and brings thousands of workers to Dutch Harbor.

The main reason for that is cost. He said the Trump administration’s approach to hiring foreign workers has also made a difficult and expensive process even more complicated.

“It doesn’t make for good planning for processors, when you are bringing 200 or 300 people in from Eastern Europe and you don’t know for sure if you’re going to get supplemental visas, if [they’re] going to get approved in time, if they’re going to be in Alaska when you need them, when the season’s started,” he said.

UniSea started participating in the H-2B program in 2019, and prior to that, the company employed 100% U.S. domestic workers, according to Enlow. Some of those were green card holders or permanent residents, living in the U.S. — most from the Philippines.

When the company was actively using the special visas, as many as half of UniSea’s workers were foreign.

The company still employs a handful of Ukrainian employees who were hired through a special program designed to help those who were displaced from the Russian invasion, and will continue to work for the processor, Enlow said.

“They’re not bound by some of the rules and restrictions of the H-2B program,” he said. “They can stay extended periods of time. They can work full time, year round, they don’t have to be necessarily processors. They can work in other jobs, in other areas.”

UniSea isn’t the only regional processor filling jobs with American workers. Trident Seafoods — one of the largest seafood processors in the nation — said it employs almost an exclusively domestic workforce.

A spokesperson for the company said the processor — which has facilities across Alaska, from the Aleutians to Southeast and Bristol Bay — has been moving away from the H-2B program since 2023, in an attempt to strengthen long-term, local employment.

Westward Seafoods, another shore-based processor in Unalaska, would not provide information on employment data.

Alaska: the ‘poster child for foreign labor’

Brian Gannon is the vice president of global partnerships for LaborMex, a Texas-based company that helps connect U.S. businesses with foreign nationals for temporary or seasonal work. He said when it comes to handling and packaging Alaska’s massive seafood exports, especially for cod and pollock, the state has a very small local employment pool to work with.

“For 100 years, people have been coming from somewhere else to process fish in Alaska,” Gannon said.

Processing fish involves long hours, and often tough, repetitive and pungent work. Considering there is an entire area of plants often referred to as the “slimeline,” it can be difficult to fill those jobs.

Gannon, who started his career as a guest worker from Montana at a processing plant in Chignik in 1990, said despite the lackluster appeal of processing work, Alaska has done a good job attracting seasonal workers from afar.

“Alaska is really a poster child for foreign labor, in as much as the oil industry and forestry and mineral extraction and seafood production, etc., in Alaska for 150 years, [has] been built on a small amount of available local labor and a large amount of labor coming from somewhere else,” he said.

The Alaska Department of Labor found that in 2023 the state’s seafood industry employed nearly 22,000 workers, roughly 83% of which were nonresidents of the state. That year, the Alaska pollock industry directly employed over 8,000 workers, according to a report from Northern Economics on the contributions of the state’s pollock industry. Most were workers from the U.S., roughly 31% from Alaska, and about 12% were residents of other countries.

H-2B visa program helps fill employment gaps

Gannon said about 10 years ago, the seafood industry’s domestic workforce started to run dry. The industry’s pool of seasonal workers wasn’t replenishing. And that was especially challenging for cod and pollock processing, which unlike salmon, for example, don’t have peak seasons in the summer. He said salmon can have an advantage because it’s a summer fishery, and people sometimes have that season off. Ultimately, Gannon said companies just couldn’t match the shortfalls.

“And that’s where that H-2B visa came in quite handy,” he said.

The H-2B visas weren’t really used in Alaska’s seafood industry until about 12 years ago, according to Gannon. Congress currently doles out 66,000 for the entire fiscal year, and Gannon said they can get about 250,000 requests. Congress sometimes approves special increases for those visas.

Within the pollock processing industry, the program has been used among all sectors of processors. However, the catcher-processor fleet — that processes at sea — is required by law to employ 75% American citizens and green card holders. According to officials in the industry, they’ve never made any significant use of the H-2B program.

For a while the visas, while complicated to obtain, worked well. But Gannon said over the past several years a lot has changed in the pollock industry.

Changes in the industry spark a return to domestic labor 

“So many things have upended the apple cart, and the pollock processors are not necessarily producing as much,” he said.

Gannon said things like the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, changes in the nation’s political dynamics and competition from China and Russia have made it hard for pollock processors to make ends meet.

Gannon said Alaska seafood companies also likely had trouble matching the prevailing wage requirements for H-2B visa holders, which he said had surpassed Alaska’s minimum wage at one point. He said the Department of Labor sets those wages, and they have to be matched or exceeded for all processors at the plant.

The seafood industry in general has also seen increases in processing costs, wages, energy prices, as well as drops in sale prices for every major species group in 2023, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Enlow said UniSea won’t be saving much, if any, money right away by switching back to an American workforce, because he’s expecting a high attrition rate.

“And so you’re going to need to hire more and bring up more people than you actually would need over time, because you’re going to lose some of those workers,” he said.

But Enlow said that should eventually be offset by avoiding uncertainties around international travel and immigration concerns.