For too long, Alaskans have been fed a steady diet of political soundbites, empty promises, and misdirected policies that benefit special interests more than the people they’re supposed to serve. The 2025 legislative session proved to be no exception – only this time, the damage was deeper, the spending more reckless, and the consequences far more perilous.
1. Education Spending Without Accountability
Instead of seizing the opportunity to reform Alaska’s failing public education system, the legislature doubled down on unsustainable spending. They increased the Base Student Allocation (BSA) with no structural reform, no performance benchmarks, and no consequences for failure.
Alaska remains among the worst in the nation in reading, math, and graduation rates despite spending more per student than most states. Where is the accountability? Where is the return on investment? Rather than empower parents and local communities, the legislature chose once again to enrich bureaucrats, appease public unions, and preserve a status quo that fails our children.
Where do you stand, Alaskan voters?
2. Medicaid Expansion: A Looming Fiscal Catastrophe
The refusal to confront the unsustainable burden of Medicaid expansion is nothing short of a betrayal. Over the past decade, Alaska’s share of costs for the expansion population has exploded, draining billions from the general fund. Meanwhile, rural clinics remain understaffed, providers flee the state, and the bureaucracy grows fatter.
The Department of Health has become a behemoth—bloated, inefficient, and unaccountable. Audits are shelved. Tribal health sovereignty is ignored. Reforms are blocked. All so that Juneau politicians can continue pretending this broken system is a success.
Where do you stand, Alaskan voters?
3. Defined Benefits: A Return to a Bankrupt Past
Despite clear warnings from financial experts and actuaries, the legislature took steps in 2025 to reinstate a defined benefit pension system for public employees—a system that nearly bankrupted this state 20 years ago.
This is not a step toward fiscal responsibility. It is a retreat into insolvency, driven by public sector union demands and political cowardice. We are mortgaging our children’s future to satisfy a small group of entrenched interests today.
Where do you stand, Alaskan voters?
4. The Permanent Fund Dividend: From Shared Wealth to Government Slush Fund
The Permanent Fund Dividend was created as a promise – a compact between the state and its people that ensured every Alaskan would benefit directly from our shared natural resource wealth. That promise is now routinely broken.
In 2025, the legislature once again looted the dividend to fund government growth. No vote from the people. No structural fix. Just more theft masked as “fiscal responsibility.”
Where do you stand, Alaskan voters?
The Verdict: Alaska Needs a Course Correction—Now
The 2025 session should serve as a blaring alarm to all Alaskans: the current political class is unwilling or unable to govern in your interest. Instead of vision, we get vanity. Instead of reform, we get retreat. Instead of solutions, we get slogans.
What Comes Next?
The time has come to clean house. Not with bumper sticker rhetoric, but with bold, principled leadership ready to:
— Reform education to prioritize outcomes, innovation, and local control.
— Rebuild health care and welfare to reflect fiscal sanity and patient-centered care.
— Restore the full statutory PFD and pass a constitutional amendment to protect it.
— Reject defined benefits and replace them with modern, sustainable retirement systems.
The 2026 elections cannot be a personality contest. They must be a referendum on priorities. If we fail now, we may lose the solvency, sovereignty, and soul of Alaska forever.
A Plan to Reform All 40 Districts
This is more than a campaign. It’s a movement for survival.
Step 1: District Leadership Teams
Establish grassroots leaders in all 40 legislative districts tasked with:
— Recruiting private-sector, military, and civic-minded candidates.
— Organizing neighborhood outreach, town halls, and voter registration.
Step 2: Candidate Boot Camps
Equip new candidates with:
— Constitutional literacy.
— Policy fluency in education, healthcare, and the PFD.
— Strategic communication skills to battle entrenched media narratives.
Step 3: Unified Conservative Platform
All candidates pledge to:
— Enact education choice and reform.
— Audit and restructure Medicaid.
— Restore the statutory PFD.
— Cap government growth.
Step 4: Break the Bipartisan Coalition
Identify battleground districts where moderate incumbents enable progressive policy. Replace them with reform-first conservatives who refuse to trade your dividend for committee seats.
Step 5: Partner with a Prepared Governor
Alaska needs a Trump-style executive: fully briefed, legally armed, and operational on Day One. No more transitions. No more wasted first years. The next governor must walk into office with:
— Executive orders drafted.
— Appointees vetted.
— Lawsuits ready.
— A mandate for war against inertia.
Soundbites Alaskans Are Sick of Hearing:
— “It’s complicated.”
— “We need more time.”
— “Let’s kick it to a working group.”
— “It’s not politically feasible.”
— “There’s no appetite for that.”
We’re not hungry for appetite. We’re starving for courage.
The Final Word: No More Caretakers. Time for Reformers.
Alaska doesn’t need more managers. It needs visionaries – warriors, builders and fighters. It needs a fresh crop of legislators willing to break glass, speak plainly, and sacrifice comfort for the people they serve.
Let the 2026 election be the moment Alaska remembers who it is: bold, independent, and unwilling to be ruled by the cowardice of career politicians. Let this be the year the people – not the bureaucracy – win.
Where do you stand, Alaskan voters?
24 Comments
To the author: Keep the thoughts coming. Alaska is going to have to choose better leadership and so far, everyone that has filed is the negative of what this state needs in leadership. So, keep the thoughts coming and hope someone has the foresight and work capability to put in and get elected to the leadership of this state.
I agree Diana, and may I suggest that a Suzanne downing promoted Bernadette Wilson candidate not be considered either!
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I simply have no hope. After spending enormous amounts of my own time and energy on the campaign trail, I can see that our voting population (roughly 20% of the eligible voters actually cast votes statewide) has no wisdom to see past the marketing campaigns, and no memory to recall the bad things their representatives have done in the past. Conservatives in Alaska screw themselves every time because they are stubborn, willfully ignorant (often, not always), and set in their ways. Because they are SO PREDICTABLE, the operatives who promote candidates (from Congress down to our local utility boards) can make a calaculated play on us every time. We always fail to see what’s really going on because we inevitably focus on the red herrings.
Hope might be hard to hang on to, Dee Cee, don’t lose it, that’s what they want you to do.
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We don’t know the truth of election results or voter turnout numbers.
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All we know about election results and voter turnout is what we’re told by unelected officials, some of whom are employed by the same people running for re-election.
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We don’t know how our election system “works”.
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From mail-in voting, ballot harvesting, ballot stuffing, proprietary vote-tabulation gear interference, missing or stolen mail-in ballots, amateur handwriting “experts” curing ballots, corrupted voter rolls, election-law violations, dark-money infusions, loss of ballot-trail auditing after second-round RCV tabulation, to outsourced voter-roll management to an organization with leftist ties, we know how our election system is supposed to work, but we don’t know how it actually works, or what keeps it safe when every part of it’s so easily corruptible.
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Stubborn and set in our ways might be a good thing …shouldn’t we get that way when our borders, language, culture, everythings that make us Americans is attacked? Should we not be stubborn, set in our ways when this filth invade our schools, kill babies, etc., etc.?
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Willfully ignorant of the benefits of infanticide, illiteracy, murder, rape, vagrancy, illegal immigration, child mutilation, transvestic grooming, election fraud, education-industry racketeering? Yes.
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Willfully ignorant of what props up our enemies, figuring out what props ’em up, how to chop it out from under them, how to do so reasonably legally? No, we want to know all about that.
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So, don’t lose hope in stubborn people set in their ways, these could be the very visionary warriors who’ll save us.
Morrigan. What an awful landscape in your mind.
Most of our legislature needs to be ousted. As long as we have RCV, cheat by mail and lazy non-voters, most of these people will grievously stay in office.
Yes, and move them out of their safe haven in Juneau.. Make them more accessible to the average Alaskan.
Agree completely. It is a travesty the average citizen cannot even visit our state capitol during the legislative session.
We’ve voted the move to Willow twice and a third time to anywhere other than Juneau. Big money bribed the state and it will cost to much We’ve been told but no proof to move it up this way. Big money men got rich from state funds renting their buildings. Lastly if government was in Anchorage the playboy would have to do some work and the pages would be out of a job. No More hanky panky because momma could walk in at any moment!
Yes, Neil.. I agree… I remember the votes.. But, the .. “costs too much money” argument doesn’t really fly, when one considers what is costing us for them to stay in their safe haven… The building(s) that they are using now are not free, by any means either.
Agree
#MeToo
So this essay states:
1) No to Education although Pre- K, Small Class Sizes
2) No to healthcare for unhealthy underpayed populace
3) No to recruitment of excellent public employees
4) No more collaboration and compromise.
YOU SEEM TO BE ADVOCATING FOR A ONE PARTY AUTOCRATIC RULE.
why don’t we just pay some taxes?
If our legislature could collectively manage a realistic budget and prove they are mindful and prudent with spending, and were not owned by public employee unions, then maybe taxes could be a consideration. Certainly not with what we have now. As for your ‘straw man’ points, no one is saying any of that. Nothing of the sort was stated in the article.
moving the legislative sessions SAVES MONEY! STOP LYING!
Excellent article thank you. Spot on.
Now is the time to start to plan the on the ground effort to call a constitutional convention in 8 years. This is the nuclear option that the pols are terrified of because they lose control. This is also the nuclear option that the lobbyist and special interests fear because they cannot buy off/ control it.if we wait for the election n 8 years to build support, we will have given them the Tim to do their fear mongering.we need to organize now and take control from these corrupt feckless pols who claim to represent us
IF, (Big IF) you can find anyone to run after the idot republicans get done excoriating those they elected, you think they will sign pledges. No one is ever going to do that again after seeing how politicians who signed have been treated. Great ideas. How about some that will work?
We need to fire most of them by primarying these lairs. They have betrayed us all. We need new people that are not in the system.
Dave Maxwell- we need your bull dog attitude and we could also use Neil DeWitt. Are you guys up for the challenge? You are MEN with strong backbones and integrity. What say you? Come on guys… I know you have the fight to bring the Capitol to a road system and we don’t need a damn Taj Mahal… lets put it it a regular easily accessible building! Time to cut more PORK!! Say you will!!!
It’s not in his mind many it’s right in front of our faces and I’m pissed too. This country is spinning out of control.