Federal Government

Congress approved critical funding for rural schools Tuesday night with the Secure Rural Schools Reauthorization Act.

More than $12 million is set aside for Alaskan communities affected by the decline of the timber industry. That money goes to districts with large amounts of untaxed federal land, and is distributed in annual payments to rural boroughs and school districts — including those near the Tongass National Forest in Southeast and the Chugach near Prince William Sound.

“We had a big success,” said Rep. Jeremy Bynum (R-Ketchikan). “The legislature spoke with a unified voice that Secure Rural Schools needed to be reauthorized.”

Bynum sponsored a resolution earlier this year to renew and permanently reinstate the program. He said when the funding lapsed the past two years, those smaller rural communities felt the impact.

“We absolutely noticed that not having that funding available put an immediate pressure on, how do we backfill that funding?” he said.

In Ketchikan, the annual payments go to the borough and typically end up being between $1 million to $1.5 million. In smaller communities, like Wrangell, those payments end up being a big portion of their school budget.

The Secure Rural Schools Act initially passed in 2000 in response to the decline of the timber industry. But that funding lapsed at the end of the 2023 fiscal year. With overwhelming bipartisan support, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to reauthorize that program through September of 2026, including two years worth of back-pay.

Bynum says he knows this reauthorization isn’t a permanent fix, and that it will take work to find other ways to fill that gap and be less reliant on Secure Rural Schools funds.

“What I don’t want to have happen is I don’t want to end up in a situation where we let it lapse again, and then we’re really kind of scrambling to figure out how to effectively do the backfill for for our school funding,” he said.

Bynum says there has been discussion of filling that financial gap with longer-term logging contracts, but he doesn’t believe that will be close to enough. He says those logging contracts aren’t long enough to see forest industries revitalized.

The federal payment amounts are decided by how much money each community would have made in the height of the logging industry.

For rural municipalities that have counted on this funding for over 20 years, losing it has been a big financial blow.

In Ketchikan, Secure Rural Schools money goes directly into the Local Education Fund, a borough-managed account that funds schools and is primarily paid for with property taxes. There’s a $2 million floor for the Local Education Fund that, without a supermajority vote from the assembly, the borough’s required to stay above.

Charlanne Thomas, the finance director for the Ketchikan Gateway Borough, said that without the Secure Rural Schools money, the account went below the $2 million floor.

She says without those payments, they might have to pull from the borough’s general fund.

“So if we end up in a shortage in the Local Education Fund, it could result in property taxes being raised to make up the difference or supplementing it from the general fund, which could affect the sales tax needing to be increased,” Thomas said. “So it kind of has a domino effect. If one is shorted, it would definitely affect the other fund.”

The Secure Rural Schools Reauthorization Act now heads to the president’s desk. It is unclear when that will happen. Once it is signed into law, payments are expected to be distributed within 45 days.

Federal funding for libraries and museums has been reinstated nine months after the Trump administration first sought to eliminate the agency that provides that money.

The initial move sparked concern around Alaska, where dozens of tribes and villages rely on federal dollars to pay staff and offer programming at libraries. At the time, a handful of libraries reported grant cancellations.

But in early December, the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services said the funding had been restored. The move came after a Rhode Island District Court judge ruled last month on a lawsuit brought by 21 states over the cuts. The judge ruled that the funding cancellation was unconstitutional.

“This action supersedes any prior notices which may have been received related to grant termination,” the agency said in the three-sentence notice. The notice did not acknowledge the recent ruling, but said grantees should check its online grant management system for more information.

At least some libraries in Alaska that lost federal funding last spring have received notice that it’s been reinstated. But in at least two cases, that happened months before the November ruling.

The Tuzzy Consortium Library in Utqiaġvik saw a major grant cancellation earlier this year. The $80,000 grant pays for staff and professional development at seven branch libraries across the North Slope.

Library director Teressa Williams said she received a reinstatement notice in July that said the agency had determined that the grant “is consistent with the agency’s priorities and furtherance of the President’s agenda.”

“I don’t know why we got reinstated, whereas others didn’t,” Williams said.

The library in the Native village of Klukwan, outside Haines, lost the bulk of its funding in the spring. That included a $150,000 grant, of which only $100,000 had been spent, plus another $10,000 grant.

The move forced staff to dramatically slash hours to just four per week, and to cancel all events, workshops and other programming.

As of early December, both grants were restored – and the library had been awarded two new ones.

The funding came through sporadically over the course of several months, Klukwan library co-director Jamie Katzeek said in an email. The library’s $10,000 grant was reinstated in June. Then, in August, the library was awarded the same grant for the coming year. In September, the agency notified the library it had been awarded a 2-year “enhancement grant” for fiscal year 2025. Finally, in early December, the library’s larger $150,000 grant was reinstated.

“This will give us funding for staff hours as well as being able to offer our originally planned programming,” Katzeek said in an email Wednesday morning.

Katzeek said the library is currently re-working its budget, but the current plan is to be open five or six days each week.

The president of the Alaska Library Association was not available to comment. Association President-elect Rebecca Moorman said she reached out to libraries across the state to check in on their funding but so far has not received many responses.

Moorman did hear that one project with a suspended grant just had its funding restored, but she declined to elaborate.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services also provides funding to other entities, including states.

Some states received cancellation notices. But Alaska State Libraries, Archives and Museums Director Amy Phillips-Chan said in an email Friday morning that Alaska never received one, and “ultimately received the entire allocation of IMLS Grants to States funding for 2024, and a similar allocation for 2025.”

The American Library Association said in a statement that the organization is “breathing a sigh of relief.”

“Restoration of these grants is a massive win for libraries of all kinds in all states,” wrote association President Sam Helmich. “Every public, school and academic library and their patrons benefit from the research findings and program outcomes from individual library and organization grantees.”

Helmich added that the fight may not be over, given that the administration could appeal the court decision – and that Congress could choose not to fund the agency in the future.

Environmental and Native organizations on Thursday sued the Trump administration to try to overturn last month’s approval of an expansive oil-exploration program on the North Slope.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Anchorage, said the U.S. Bureau of Land Management violated federal laws when it gave the go-ahead to a ConocoPhillips plan for seismic surveys and exploration drilling this winter on federal lands in Arctic Alaska.

ConocoPhillips’ plans call for seismic surveys in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, along with four exploration wells and associated development. The exploration work is planned near ConocoPhillips’ huge Willow project, which is in development, and its Greater Mooses Tooth Unit, which is already producing oil.

The plaintiffs bringing the lawsuit are Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic, the Center for Biological Diversity and The Wilderness Society. They are represented by the environmental law firm Earthjustice.

The lawsuit argues the approval violates the Naval Petroleum Reserves Production Act, a 1976 law that mandates environmental protection in the reserve, and the Administrative Procedures Act, which concerns the public process for government decision and actions.

The planned program will cause serious environmental damage that will last for several years, including in areas around Teshekpuk Lake, the North Slope’s biggest lake, and the Colville River, known for its raptor populations and paleontological resources. Previous presidential administrations established protections for those sensitive habitats, including the calving site for the caribou herd named for the lake.

“The record shows the exploration program is likely to cause long-term harm to vegetation and soils that provide crucial habitat to caribou, birds, and a host of other wildlife in the Reserve, including to those within the Teshekpuk Lake and Colville River Special Areas,” the lawsuit said. “The exploration program is also likely to cause population-level impacts to the Teshekpuk Caribou Herd, and long-term harm to subsistent hunters and the communities that rely upon them for food security and health and wellbeing.”

The lawsuit faults the BLM and U.S. Department of the Interior for limiting public information about the proposal and, once the proposal was announced, restricting public comment to a mere seven days before concluding that the exploration work would pose no significant environmental harm.

Both the lack of public information and the conclusion were wrong, the plaintiffs said. In their lawsuit they cited expert testimony from Martha Raynolds, a University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist, who said the seismic program would scar the tundra for more than 15 years.

“The company’s plans would crush sensitive Arctic tundra under 95,000-pound thumper trucks, disrupt caribou migration patterns and destroy our ability to enjoy these magnificent lands,” Matt Jackson, Alaska senior manager for The Wilderness Society, said in a statement. “With an administration bent on ignoring the public, our only choice is to turn to the court to defend these public lands for generations to come and ensure that our rural communities remain free to sustain our Alaskan way of life.”

Seismic surveys use sound waves to help map underground geologic structures. The work is done with vehicles that crisscross the surface. UAF experts have warned for years about the threats to tundra and permafrost from seismic surveys.

Nauri Simmonds, executive director of Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic, said the areas targeted for exploration are sensitive and should be protected from development.

“Even among our own Iñupiat relatives who support oil development, there is recognition that some places are too important to risk, too vital to our way of life to be sacrificed. ConocoPhillips’ exploration program is not only an assault on caribou and tundra — it is another chapter in the enfoldment of our people into systems designed to fracture us from within,” she said in the statement.

A spokesperson for the Department of the Interior declined to comment on the lawsuit, citing a policy concerning pending litigation.

Dennis Nuss, a ConocoPhillips spokesperson defended the approvals and criticized the plaintiffs.

“These actions by the same groups that have historically used legal maneuvers to delay exploration and development in the Petroleum Reserve jeopardize hundreds of local jobs and adds unnecessary risk to investment in Alaska,” Nuss said. “We remain confident in the robustness of our plan and BLM’s permits and look forward to completing our work within Alaska’s limited winter exploration season.”

He did not comment on whether ConocoPhillips had started the winter program.

The Willow project, with an estimated 600 million barrels of oil reserves, is expected to start producing oil in 2029. It is slated to be the westernmost producing oil field on the North Slope. The development has been controversial, but its approval by the Biden administration in 2023 has survived legal challenges. Projected revenues to the state from Willow production are now far more modest than previously estimated, according to Alaska Department of Revenue officials.

Production at the Greater Mooses Tooth site started in 2018.

WASHINGTON — The subject of Thursday’s hearing was one of the biggest political controversies of President Trump’s second term: His use of the National Guard within the United States.

Democrats on the Senate Armed Service Committee railed against the deployment of the National Guard to American cities. Some Republicans on the committee vigorously defended those urban deployments.

Sen. Dan Sullivan did neither. When it was his turn to speak, he vigorously defended Guard deployments that no one is arguing about. He spoke about the National Guard’s role repelling Russian and Chinese forces over the Pacific and the Bering Sea.

“These are front-line operations going directly against our adversaries. Wing to wing, when our fighters go intercept Russian bear bombers and MiGs that are armed,” Sullivan said. “Dangerous work. We do it all the time up in Alaska.”

Sullivan is one of 18 Republican senators running for reelection next year. Trump’s big controversies put them on a political tightrope and how they find balance could determine their political futures. If they lean away from Trump they risk becoming his target on social media. But it could prove dangerous to lean too far toward Trump, too, if some of the president’s actions become toxic to voters.

Sullivan leaned uncharacteristically to the left Thursday afternoon, with a vote to extend health care tax subsidies. That morning, at the Armed Service Committee, he employed another option: the sidestep.

He drew attention to the National Guard’s rescues after fierce storms washed houses away in Western Alaska in October. And, Sullivan said, when he was in the Marines in the 1990s, some of his battalion had domestic deployments, to the southern border and to fight forest fires in the Pacific Northwest.

“We were motivated Marines. President of the United States told us to go different places, and we went,” he said. “That’s what you do in the military.”

Sullivan did not engage Thursday as Democrats, and Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, spoke passionately against the urban deployments.

“That the President has the power to, in his own mind, decide what an emergency is and then deploy troops into our cities, I think, is exceedingly dangerous,” King said at the hearing. “And the people who founded this country thought so, too.”

King read the words of several Founding Fathers who warned that if a president has a standing army to use against his own people, he’ll become a tyrant.

Pentagon attorney Charles Young countered that President George Washington himself sent troops to put down the Whisky Rebellion, after Pennsylvanians tarred and feathered a tax collector. And Young cited 19th century Supreme Court decisions to argue that in fact, it IS up to the president to decide what’s an emergency.

Sen. Tim Sheehy of Montana was one of the Republicans who gave a full-throated defense of the urban deployments, in support of the Trump administration’s massive deportation campaign. Sheehy addressed another Pentagon witness, Gen. Gregory Guillot, the top officer responsible for the defense of North America.

“As a military commander,” Sheehy asked, “what do you feel is a greater threat to our national security? Five hundred volunteers, trained National Guardsmen walking the streets of our cities, or 20 million illegal immigrants who have entered this country over the past five years?”

Sheehy wasn’t done: “Is the influence of transnational criminal organizations that fill our country with fentanyl, poison, various other drugs, illicit activity, human trafficking? Is that a national security threat?”

The general’s answer did not matter. Sheehy, who doesn’t face voters until the middle of the next president’s term, was taking a stand.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has landed on a solution to put an end to glacial outburst floods that have grown more destructive in Juneau’s Mendenhall Valley neighborhoods over the past few summers. 

The agency will pursue something called a ‘lake tap.’ It’s essentially a tunnel through Bullard Mountain on the east side of the glacier that’s meant to steadily drain Suicide Basin so it can’t fill to the point of bursting and send some 16 billion gallons of water through the Valley. 

Denise Koch, the director of engineering & public works at the City and Borough of Juneau, explained it with a metaphor on Friday. 

“I just think about Suicide Basin as a proverbial bathtub,” she said. “What the lake tap is, is just leaving the drain open.” 

She said the drain will empty the water from Suicide Basin into Mendenhall Lake through a conduit somewhere between the face of Mendenhall Glacier and Nugget Falls.

The decision comes after a three-day, closed-door meeting the Army Corps held with federal agencies, local officials and researchers in Juneau this week. Their main task was to discuss five options to prevent homes from flooding in the future. The Army Corps initially planned to host press briefings each day, but cancelled them on Tuesday. 

The city announced today that city leaders, along with the U.S. Forest Service and the Central Council of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, support the lake tap option, aligning with many of the public comments the Army Corps received last month.

Besides a lake tap, the options discussed at the meeting were a dam at the outlet of Mendenhall Lake, a permanent levee, a bypass channel through the Mendenhall River floodplain and relocating impacted residents from the Valley. 

Koch said the group weighed the options based on risk to downstream residents, how quickly they could be built and the overall cost. 

“Ultimately, a lake tap was seen to reduce risk the most while being able to be constructed the most quickly, for the lowest amount of cost, with the least complex and least costly operation and maintenance,” Koch said. 

Koch said the tunnel could take as long as six years to excavate — the most conservative estimate. She said it could cost somewhere between $613 million and $1 billion, but that all estimates are very rough at this stage.

The Army Corps aims to finish its technical report for the lake tap in May. That will include a preliminary design, a more detailed cost estimate and a draft environmental review. There will be another public comment period once it’s complete.

To implement the solution, the Army Corps will need authorization and funding from Congress. 

Correction: This article has been updated to clarify that a full draft environmental impact statement is unlikely to be drafted in the technical report.

Last week, members of the body that oversees federal fisheries off Alaska’s coast recommended keeping next year’s catch limits for the sprawling Bering Sea pollock fishery about the same as this year.

Managing the nation’s largest commercial fishery is never simple, but North Pacific Fishery Management Council member Anne Vanderhoeven said during the meeting that this year had unprecedented challenges.

“Because of the lapse in federal funding and the subsequent government shutdown, updated stock assessments are not available,” she said.

Without those assessments, the council had to rely on older data and partial updates.

Fisheries biologist Diana Stram runs the groundfish plan team, which presents annual reports to the council. She says the team had to cancel its meeting last month when the federal government shut down for over six weeks.

And that meant the organization recommending catch limits could be doing it without the most recent information.

“We’re not able to get new stock assessments from our federal authors because they were on furlough and did not have the time to complete those new assessments,” she told the council last week. “We don’t have a groundfish plan team report as a result.”

It’s the latest hurdle for federal fisheries managers since the start of President Trump’s second term. Layoffs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center started earlier this year. Many of those workers help with surveys that inform how fisheries should open. The credit cards used to purchase supplies for summer research trips were frozen just as the boats were gearing up. And the council itself saw dramatic budget reductions, leading to its last meeting being moved online.

Still, at the council meeting this month, NOAA scientists emphasized that last year’s assessment models were strong and built on decades of survey work. They told the council the projections from last year were reliable enough to guide 2026 limits.

Scientists and council members said that some quotas could have increased if this year’s data was included.

Despite the disruptions, council members said the process held together well enough to set this year’s recommendations. But they acknowledged that Alaska’s largest fishery is increasingly vulnerable to forces outside the water.