All three members of Alaska’s all-Republican congressional delegation during their annual speeches to the Alaska Legislature asked to be told about cuts, firings or other concerning actions by the Trump administration. For the past month state Rep. Alyse Galvin (I-Anchorage) has been collecting reports from dozens of federal employees, as well as other affected residents, detailing those concerns and specific impacts for Alaska.

How many such cases the delegation deem worthy of calling attention to — and how many among those the Trump administration deems worthy of restitution — is an open question. As of now there are individual instances of success and failure.

“I don’t think that the relationship is such that (delegation members) get back to me and say ‘I fixed this or that,’” Galvin said in an interview Saturday. “What I’m doing for the first bit is trying to understand how big the iceberg is.”

Responses from 50 current and former federal employees were received by Galvin as of Friday, along with 24 responses from family members and others with close ties to federal programs. The responses detail downsizing ranging from three of 16 employees at a U.S. Forest Service office in Anchorage to all 86 employees at an Environmental Protection Agency grant program. Impacts range from cutting meal funds for day care programs to an inability to evaluate forest areas for timber harvesting — the latter impeding industry activity Trump has declared a renewed priority.

A dozen fired employees have responded so far to a question about returning to their job due to a court-ordered or other reinstatement, with 10 saying they will, one declining and one answering “I plan to return for now, but am undecided how long I will remain.”

“Some respondents expressed notable hesitation and trepidation in returning to their former places and positions of employment, due to the perceived instability of events,” the report states.

One thing that is certain for many policymakers and affected Alaskans: a system of government where the president does a wholesale elimination of government programs, people and funds with little evaluation — or legal authority, according to numerous judicial rulings — and then bestows restoration upon those making pleas who win his favor isn’t the norm.

“That’s not how it’s supposed to work, right?” state Sen. Jesse Kiehl, a Juneau Democrat, said Saturday. “Congress appropriated money, and agencies have jobs to do or grants to hand out, and it should not be to an executive branch to just say ‘Nah, we don’t think so, unless we like you or somebody who does.’ That’s that’s not the American system, or not how it’s supposed to be. So, yeah, I have some serious structural concerns. I’m grateful to our delegation for their work, but this is not how it’s supposed to go.”

Both of Alaska’s U.S. senators were asked during their visits to the Alaska State Capitol last week if the U.S. is in a constitutional crisis due to Trump’s encroachment on legislative and judicial authority (the president and his allies during the past week called for the impeachment of judges ruling against the administration). Both said no, although Sen. Lisa Murkowski said Trump is testing the limits of democracy and if Congress fails to assert itself ”that’s when you may get closer to a constitutional crisis.”

U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski raises her right hand to demonstrate the oath she took while answering a question about her responsibility to defend the U.S. Constitution during her annual address to the Alaska Legislature on March 18, 2025. (Jasz Garrett / Juneau Empire file photo)

Experts say Trump is wielding similar supreme authority by imposing tariffs on countries and industries with exemptions for those who win his favor, and cancelling funding for entities such as universities unless they alter curriculums and remove material referencing diversity.

“Honest to god, I’ve never seen anything like it,” Steven Levitsky, coauthor of “How Democracies Die,” told The New York Times last week. “We look at these comparative cases in the 21st century, like Hungary and Poland and Turkey. And in a lot of respects, this is worse. These first two months have been much more aggressively authoritarian than almost any other comparable case I know of democratic backsliding.”

Surveying statewide impacts

Galvin said she started her statewide data collection project because federal workers, other people affected by program changes and public officials are expressing frustration about the scarcity of verifiable official information about the cuts. She is sharing a series of updated reports with all three members of the congressional delegation, as well as making it available to other state legislators and officials.

“They are experiencing not only their personal trauma of how to handle their health care, chaos in the home with the children of course being upset, and moving to find different schools and different places that they can afford — perhaps moving out of state,” she said during a speech on the House floor Friday. “But also they’re very concerned about the state of Alaska and how we might be experiencing our services so differently now.”

“I think about our tourism industry, our natural resource industry. All of them do rely on these…It feels like it’s not tangible to us, but even things like weather when fishermen don’t know what the best weather is for their next open season, or all of these opportunities to move products and logistics, it’s all affected. And so I just wanted to share these individual stories.”

While the surveys don’t provide a complete picture of the total number of fired and retained federal employees in Alaska, they do offer some insight into the level of cuts and resulting impacts across a wide spectrum of the federal government.

Twenty-seven of the 50 federal workers responding to the survey as of Friday had been fired, while 19 more were notified of buyouts by the administration. In a followup survey by Galvin to the 27 fired workers after reinstatements for most of them were ordered by judges, 10 of the 12 who responded stated they had received an official notice of that status — although many such employees have stated elsewhere that while they are on the payroll again, they have not actually been told to return to work.

Nine of the employees responding were from Juneau, four each from Anchorage and Fairbanks, two from Wrangell, and one from communities ranging from Aleknagik to Talkeetna. The departments affected were the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and U.S. Forest Service with six fired respondents in each, the Federal Highway Administration and National Park Service with four each, Bureau of Land Management with two, and four departments including the EPA and Federal Aviation Administration with one apiece.

The surveys are full of federal employees’ personal and family hardship narratives involving threats to everyday essentials such as health and housing. But since Trump budget director Russel Vought has stated “we want to put them in trauma” — a prevailing administration sentiment — the delegation and state legislators are suggesting people make a different plea.

U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, during his speech to the Legislature, said Alaskans should cite how cuts and/or firings impede an executive order by Trump doing away with all federal regulations that inhibit maximum utilization of the state’s natural resources.

“If there is a decision that you’re seeing that’s being made — and we’re trying to track all of them — that impacts safety in Alaska or impacts our economy, we’ve been going to them and saying, ‘Look at that EO. You can’t do that. You need to reverse it,’” Sullivan said.

U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) delivers his annual speech the Alaska Legislature on March 20, 2025. (Mark Sabbatini / Juneau Empire file photo)

Galvin said she is altering her survey, which currently asks federal employees to explain “how the position contributes to the betterment of the state,” to instead focus on how jobs and programs targeted are serving Trump’s mandates. Some examples are already explained in detail in the responses received.

A biologist fired from a NOAA lab in Juneau said the agency now can’t collect data necessary for accurate fisheries stock assessments. A former Forest Service worker in Petersburg states the job provided “commercial firewood/timber sale accounting for local small businesses and forest management.”

A former federal archaeologist on Wrangell also cited adverse impacts to the timber industry.

“Timber sales, other development, improvements, and resource extraction will be held up because an archaeologist from a district will have to visit Wrangell to meet Section 106 compliance requirements,” the former employee wrote.

Section 106 references a portion of the National Historic Preservation Act. Such regulations are among those being specifically targeted by Trump for elimination if they inhibit resource extraction activities.

The federal cuts are largely being overseen by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which is justifying the actions as rooting out “fraud, waste and abuse.” But a fired federal highways worker said the loss of six of his office’s 17 employees means there will be less ability to ensure the Alaska Department of Transporation and Public Facilities is properly and efficiently using billions of dollars of federal funds.

“In the near term, lack of oversight will allow DOT&PF to avoid addressing their structural challenges and still deliver construction dollars,” the fired employee wrote. “At some point the federal administration will see the structural challenges in DOT&PF’s program as fraud, waste and abuse.”

Call and response

For people making arguments that may be seen favorably by the Trump administration, the next question is how many of those arguments are being heard by Alaska’s delegation and seen as worthy of presenting to higher authorities.

Murkowski, in a Feb. 5 social media message, wrote “the U.S. Senate phone system has been receiving around 1,600 calls each minute, compared to the 40 calls per minute we usually receive, which has disrupted our call systems.”

Communications were overwhelmed again when she hosted a virtual town hall Feb. 19 that about 1,000 people reportedly connected to, but her official Facebook page had 650 comments 20 minutes after it ended, with the dominant theme being complaints from people who said they were unable to dial into the call with the provided instructions.

Even so, legislators interviewed said she’s generally been the easiest to reach and most responsive to concerns among Alaska’s congressional delegation. Murkowski is also openly expressing numerous concerns about Trump administration actions — notably about the methods being used to achieve his agenda — while Sullivan and Rep. Nick Begich III are expressing near-universal support for the administration to date.

Joe Plesha, a spokesperson for Murkowski, said Saturday her office is receiving hundreds of calls daily, along with email and other communications.

“Sometimes it’s a lot of just constituents who have concerns or constituents are expressing their support,” he said. “So it’s not all necessarily things that need staff attention.”

The volume of communications is pressing Murkowski’s staff, but “I’d push back on the assertion that you have to be powerful or important to make sure this rises to the senator,” Plesha said.

“We’re hearing from fisherman on like, for example, the issue that she raised where she texted Marco Rubio (the Secretary of State) about the IFQ permit holders for halibut and then kind of shaking that loose,” he said, referring to a situation where cuts were holding up processing of Individual Fishing Quota permits.

Sullivan’s office, when asked by the Empire about the volume of requests received and any specific instances where reversals to cuts were sought, stated in an email Saturday that “Senator Sullivan’s office has recently received thousands of public opinion messages from Alaskans, and the Senator is taking those opinions seriously and works hard on responding to Alaskans who reach out to him.” Similar questions sent to a Begich spokesperson did not receive a response.

A successful reversal by Sullivan occurred after officials in Klukwan called Kiehl’s office expressing concern about a riverbank stabilization project being put on hold, the Juneau state senator said.

“They had a grant to do some streambank stabilization to keep the village from washing away, and that got frozen when they were about to hit go on ordering their materials and signing their contracts,” Kiehl said. “Dan Sullivan’s office absolutely pounced on it and and they had the go-ahead to use that grant money in 24 hours.”

U.S. Rep. Nick Begich (R-Alaska) departs the House Chamber after his speech to the Alaska Legislature on Feb. 20, 2025. (Mark Sabbatini / Juneau Empire file photo)

But such examples are a tiny fraction of the projects and programs in Alaska hit by cuts that will adversely affect the state and its residents, according the current and former federal workers — as well as state, municipal, tribal, nonprofit and business leaders who say the uncertainty and fear that causes is furthering the problem.

“This is our problem — how do we do our job well if we can’t open our line of communication in a two-way — this is, I think, the biggest problem with government and why people don’t trust government, don’t know government, have no idea what they’re really going to do for them is because we don’t reach out to them,” Galvin said.

Galvin said her data-collection project, in addition to passing on the concerns of Alaskans to their congressional representatives, is also being shared with others such as the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development in an effort to resolve the dilemmas not on Trump’s agenda.

“Everyone who responds to us, to the survey, we are connecting them with the State of Alaska so that we hopefully can retain these employees and find ways to connect them to something that might keep them here in this state,” she said.

The project is being expanded beyond employee surveys to include categories such as grants and health care programs, since those are also in the Trump administration’s crosshairs, Galvin said. She said there will also be drop-down menus referencing key words in the president’s Alaska-specific executive order so the congressional delegation can quickly see how it fulfills that mandate.

“I want to do whatever I can do to make this work to help them advocate better for us,” she said. “I think that’s my goal. I figure I have some connections with a lot of people. That’s our job, to make Alaska strong, and we need federal money.”

• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.