By: Alaska State Representatives Kevin McCabe, Sarah Vance, and Jubilee Underwood.

There is a graphic going around social media made to look like a dollar bill with Jay Hammond’s face on it. It tells Alaskans that on April 19, 2026, the Legislature voted to cut the full Permanent Fund dividend out of the budget, and that the vote was unanimous, 40 to 0.

Before sharing it, go to akleg.gov, open the House Journal, and read page 2057.

Here are the facts. On April 8, House Bill 263, the operating budget, was before the House. The Majority Leader moved that the House Finance Committee substitute be adopted as the working version of the bill and asked for unanimous consent. The journal records the result in four words:

“There being no objection.”

That was not a 40-to-0 vote. There was no roll call vote at all.

Committee substitutes are adopted this way, all the time, because we need a working version before we can debate and amend it. Nobody is voting on the PFD when that motion is made, or education, public safety, or any other line in the budget. We are deciding which draft we are going to work from, because debating and amending a bill everyone in the chamber knows is about to be replaced, burns days we do not have. Unless somebody objects, we move on.

You can see what an actual vote looks like two pages later. Amendment No. 5 went to a roll call and passed 21 to 19. The journal lists all 40 members by name, yeas and nays. Nothing like that appears for adoption of the committee substitute because nobody requested a vote.

So, the 40 to 0 tally is not a misreading of the record. It is not in the record at all. It is a number placed on a picture of a dollar bill and offered to Alaskans on faith, in an election year, by a former legislator describing a floor session he has not sat in since January of 2025.

And the date is wrong. The graphic says April 19 (A Sunday). This happened on April 8. On April 16, three days before the date he now claims the vote occurred, the same author commented on a column by Greg Sarber in the Alaska Watchman, claiming it happened April 8. He had the date right then.

But here is the part that matters most. Read three lines farther down page 2057: “The Speaker stated that, without objection, Amendment No. 1 would be moved to the bottom of the amendments.”

McCabe offered Amendment No. 1. It locked in the full statutory dividend of roughly $3,800 and functioned as a pseudo spending cap, forcing an honest debate about what state government actually costs. On April 8 it was set aside to be taken up last.

Alaskans have every reason to be angry about what has happened to the dividend. We are as well. But the PFD was not broken by a procedural motion in April 2026.

It came back two days later, on Friday, April 10. Representative Calvin Schrage offered an amendment that cut the dividend in that amendment to roughly $1,500. Two Republicans joined the majority to adopt that change. At that point, the amendment no longer did what it was written to do, so McCabe moved to withdraw it rather than let it become the vehicle for cutting the dividend. The House refused to let him withdraw it, with a single Republican joining the majority to keep it alive. The rewritten amendment then passed 23 to 17.

That is the vote. It has a date, a roll call, and forty names attached to it. It happened April 10, not April 19. It was not unanimous. And the graphic does not mention it.

He had the right page. He read the wrong line.

Wrong vote, wrong date, wrong direction. As usual, wrong on all counts.

By the time the budget gets to the floor, the chances of a full PFD amendment are almost nil. A vote for a budget is not a vote against the PFD. That is a nonsensical idea.

However, a real grievance underlies all of this, and that is why getting it right matters. Alaskans have every reason to be angry about what has happened to the dividend. We are as well. But the PFD was not broken by a procedural motion in April 2026. The real fight started years ago.

So, when somebody asks for your vote this fall, forget the imaginary 40 to 0 tally and ask about a vote that may actually happen…

Jay Hammond and Clem Tillion built the dividend around a simple idea. A share of Permanent Fund earnings would go to Alaskans under a formula instead of becoming another pot of money for government to spend. Hammond understood what happens when politicians see a pile of money. Eventually somebody finds a government program that desperately needs it.

That system collided with political reality in 2016 when Governor Bill Walker vetoed roughly half the dividend appropriation. Clem Tillion, Senator Bill Wielechowski and former Senate President Rick Halford went to court, arguing that the statutory transfer did not require an annual appropriation and therefore could not be reduced through the normal veto process.

They lost. In 2017, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that Permanent Fund income is subject to the normal appropriation and veto process. Then, in 2018, SB 26 changed the statutory framework as well. Where the old dividend law had directed money to be “transferred” from the earnings reserve to the dividend fund, the new system expressly depended on money being “appropriated.”

That distinction matters. The court had already settled the constitutional question, but SB 26 brought the statute into the new reality. What Alaskans had understood for decades as a formula-driven transfer was now expressly tied to an annual appropriation.

That is the real problem. A statute can be changed. An appropriation can be reduced. A governor can veto it. We watched all three happen. Writing another promise into statute does not change that.

If Alaskans want the dividend protected from the annual political budget fight in Juneau, the real question is whether that protection belongs in the Alaska Constitution, where legislators and governors cannot change it by themselves.

So, when somebody asks for your vote this fall, forget the imaginary 40 to 0 tally and ask about a vote that may actually happen:

Will you vote to put a constitutional amendment before the people of Alaska so Alaskans themselves can decide whether the dividend should be protected from the annual appropriation process?

That answer is checkable.

And when that vote happens, it really will be in the journal.

Editor’s note: Rep. Kevin McCabe represents House District 30. Rep. Sarah Vance represents House District 6, and Jubilee Underwood currently represents District 27.

The views expressed here are those of the authors.

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