This is not political rhetoric. It is historical fact. On April 22, 2025, radio host Mike Porcaro interviewed State Sen. Shelley Hughes and casually remarked that this year’s Alaska legislative session was a “waste of time.” What he may not have realized, or perhaps what he’s been echoing subconsciously since 2015, is that every session since then has not only been a waste of time, but an incremental betrayal of Alaska’s constitutional self-governance.

It began under Governor Bill Walker, who, with the help of a complicit legislature, permanently damaged Alaska’s once world-renowned Permanent Fund Dividend program. That single act cracked the trust between the people and their government, and invited years of bloated bureaucratic overreach, fiscal sabotage and erosion of local control.

This is not a partisan lament. It’s a decade-long timeline of dismantled sovereignty.

Alaskans must now ask themselves a simple question: Was Alaska better off then or now?

Since 2015, Alaska’s government has not only failed to protect its citizens from bureaucratic bloat and fiscal dependency, but it has also actively dismantled the pillars of state sovereignty. From the assault on the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend to the assumption of unfunded federal trust responsibilities, the State of Alaska has institutionalized dependence, diluted accountability and weakened local governance.

2015 – The Betrayal Begins

Governor Bill Walker unilaterally expanded Medicaid without legislative approval, shackling Alaska to long-term federal obligations with only short-term federal incentives. That same year, the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend was effectively raided to cover bloated state budgets, marking the beginning of the end for what had been a world-leading model of citizen wealth-sharing. This paved the way for unsustainable obligations and shredded the social contract between state and citizen.

2016 – Codifying Dependency

Instead of reversing Walker’s executive overreach, the Alaska State Legislature allowed the PFD cap to become routine policy. The judiciary refused to check the executive, ruling that the legislature had the power to re-appropriate the dividend. Alaska began a new normal: permanent emergency budgeting and reactive policymaking. Bureaucracy bloated while citizen payouts shrank.

2017 – Federalization Accelerates

Alaska’s Department of Health and Social Services began absorbing increasing responsibilities from federal agencies under the guise of “partnership,” especially regarding Alaska Native healthcare systems. No additional resources, personnel, or reform authority were granted. This was not empowerment. It was quiet colonization through cost-shifting.

2018 – Bureaucracy Solidifies

The administrative state grew increasingly insulated. Education and welfare agencies prioritized compliance with federal mandates over local outcomes. Public trust in Juneau continued to erode, while watchdogs, including the Alaska Public Offices Commission (APOC), failed to adequately police the growing influence of public-sector unions and special interest PACs and, in some opinions, became a political weapon.

2019 – The Dunleavy Delay

Governor Mike Dunleavy ran on a platform of fiscal sanity but quickly caved to legislative resistance. Attempts to restore the full PFD were stonewalled. A golden opportunity to shrink government, audit Medicaid, and reform welfare was squandered. By mid-year, the “Red Pen” campaign fizzled, and the administrative state emerged stronger.

2020 – COVID as Catalyst

The pandemic expanded the welfare and healthcare bureaucracies at breakneck speed. One in three Alaskans were placed on Medicaid. Federal money flowed like a river, but oversight and reform dried up. Emergency measures embedded long-term dependencies, accelerating Alaska’s slide into a managed welfare state.

2021 – Education Captured

Despite record spending per student, Alaska’s education system ranked among the worst in the nation. Attempts to pass education reform or expand school choice failed. Teachers’ unions tightened their grip, and the Department of Education shifted from teaching academics to managing bureaucratic equity mandates and federal compliance.

2022 – RCV & Jungle Primaries: The Electoral Coup

Ballot Measure 2, passed under the guise of “transparency,” institutionalized Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) and jungle primaries. This electoral scheme eliminated party primaries and distorted voter intent, further removing electoral control from local communities. Public-sector unions and dark money groups adapted quickly, gaming the new system to entrench incumbents and dilute conservative representation.

2023 – The Rise of the Welfare-Industrial Complex

Alaska’s welfare system became a self-sustaining industry. Grants, consultants, and nonprofits grew fat off human suffering. Bureaucrats chased federal compliance metrics, not outcomes. Medicaid fraud remained unchecked. Anchorage led the way in building a homelessness industry, where tents became leverage for taxpayer-funded NGOs.

2024 – Judicial Complicity and Bureaucratic Capture

The courts failed to curb the explosion of state overreach. The Office of Children’s Services remained under federal scrutiny. Alaska’s judiciary allowed the permanent realignment of responsibility for tribal health and welfare without constitutional review. State courts routinely ruled against citizen lawsuits demanding accountability.

2025 – The Tipping Point

Now, in 2025, Alaska finds itself managing federal trust obligations with no funding, beholden to a welfare system that is unaffordable, and trapped in an electoral process (RCV) that undermines the voice of its people. This year’s legislative session, described as a “waste of time” even by sympathetic media, continues the march toward technocratic rule and away from representative democracy.

The legislative low point was House Bill 69, which sought to tie public school funding to automatic annual inflationary increases. It passed both chambers of the legislature but was vetoed by Governor Dunleavy only for that veto to be sustained by the very same legislature. It was a political theater of incompetence. On its face, the bill would have permanently baked in higher spending formulas without accountability or performance outcomes. At its core, it was a payoff to entrenched education unions and a surrender to bureaucratic inertia.

Alaska is not self-governing today. It is a managed dependency, operating at the whims of federal mandates and internal actors whose interests are not aligned with the people they claim to serve.

Conclusion: The Hard Road Back to Sovereignty

Alaska has not been developing. It has been devolving and not by accident. Each legislative session since 2015 has compounded the damage, steadily weakening the state’s autonomy, undermining representative governance, and embedding bureaucratic interests where citizen interests once prevailed. We are not managing a state anymore. We are managing the illusion of one, where real power has slipped quietly into the hands of unelected administrators, federally aligned consultants, and ideologically captured institutions.

Through reckless Medicaid expansion, the theft of the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend, the adoption of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), the explosive growth of the welfare-industrial complex, and the quiet assumption of federal trust responsibilities without funding or oversight, Alaska is being recolonized through regulation and technocracy, not by a foreign power, but by its own government acting as a proxy for outside interests.

Reclaiming Alaska’s sovereignty is possible, but it will not be easy.

The road back will be painful, politically costly, and fiercely resisted by those who profit from the status quo, especially the public sector unions. This is not a simple policy correction; it is a systemic extraction mission.

It will require:

• Repealing RCV and restoring transparent, accountable elections that reflect the will of the people not the will of nonprofits and lobbyists hiding behind PACs.
• Ending Medicaid expansion and implementing sweeping audits of the entire healthcare bureaucracy forcing a shift away from paper-pushing and fraud-ridden cost centers back toward patient-centered, outcome-driven care.
• Restoring the full Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) as a matter of moral obligation and economic principle ensuring Alaskans, not the government, benefit from their state’s natural wealth.
• Dismantling bureaucratic fiefdoms, consolidating overlapping agencies, and decentralizing state control and returning decision-making to boroughs, communities, and individuals who understand their needs far better than anyone in Juneau or Washington ever could.

Let me be clear: there is no shortcut to transforming this bloated, tangled, self-serving machine of a government into a lean, disciplined, citizen-first institution. It will require confronting entrenched unions, repealing bad laws, rewriting outdated statutes, breaking long-standing contracts, and most of all, telling the truth about how far we’ve fallen.

It will take leaders willing to be hated in the moment to be remembered in history.

It will take citizens willing to educate themselves, vote with intention, and resist the seductive promises of bureaucratic handouts in favor of long-term liberty.

Alaska is not self-governing today. It is a managed dependency, operating at the whims of federal mandates and internal actors whose interests are not aligned with the people they claim to serve.

But it doesn’t have to stay that way.

The moment we stop pretending this is acceptable and start acting like self-governing citizens again is the moment we begin Taking Back Alaska.

The views expressed here are those of the author.

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