The Alaska Republican House minority is losing one of its top budget gurus to President Donald Trump.
Donna Arduin Kauranen, who came to Alaska as the first director of the Office of Management and Budget for Gov. Mike Dunleavy, and then worked as a legislative aide for two House members, is heading to Washington, D.C. to help salvage a dying institution.
Arduin will be the chief financial officer of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, starting next week.
Arduin was deputy budget director under New York Gov. George Pataki, was budget director for Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and later for California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and was CFO for Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner, before serving for Gov. Dunleavy briefly, starting in 2019. She then was tapped to be legislative aide to Rep. Ben Carpenter and most recently for Rep. Frank Tomaszewski.
The American Legislative Exchange Council describes her as “one of the nation’s most successful veterans of state budget management and tax reform.”
Arduin is a paid member of the board of directors of the GEO Group, a publicly traded company that operates residential centers for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and she’s been recently been named chair of the Audit and Finance Committee and the Corporate Planning Committee. She is also a member of the Nominating Committee, Corporate Governance Committee and a couple of other committees that oversee the company business.
With all those responsibilities, she said she will have to leave Alaska for a while, after splitting her time between Juneau and Northern Michigan for the past several years.
Arduin will have her work cut out for her at the Kennedy Center. In February, Richard Grenell, the newly appointed president of the Kennedy Center, revealed that CFO Stacey Johnson said the center had no cash on hand or even in reserves. Johnson’s bio refers to Stacey as a “they/them,” an indication of what has happened at the Kennedy Center, where the Biden Administration allowed gender politics to rule.
Grenell said that the center was using its debt reserves and that deferred maintenance are at a crisis level.
The new team taking over the Kennedy Center will be in turnaround mode, trying to salvage a failing institution that was run by Biden’s gender-obsessed ideologues.
Earlier this month, President Trump ousted David Rubenstein as the Kennedy Center Board chairman and replaced the president of the organization that has drifted into woke ideology, and now near financial ruin.
Arduin is a graduate of Duke University with honors in economics and public policy. She worked at investment banks in New York and Tokyo before entering the public sector. In recent years, she became the president of Arduin, Laffer, and Moore Econometrics, which advises federal, state, and municipal leaders, candidates, and private sector clients on economic, fiscal and state policies.
Sounds as though she will be a big loss for Alaska; if she could have gotten around the morons on the other side of the aisle. No, she can be effective with the Kennedy Center gig; AK is looking more like a lost cause. We need more folks like Suzanne shining the light of truth on the swamp rats in Juneau, then sharing with the public in clear and articulate terms (outside the bounds of this website), if we ever want to count on a course correction from this long slide into Euro-style socialism.
Spread the word; I do every day.👍😎
A fond farewell to an individual who endeavored to put Alaska’s fiscal house in order.
As OMB Director under Governor Doneleavy she presented Big Mike with a significant number of areas within the state budget where redoing spending were feasible, including ramping back the spending stupidity at the massively wasteful Alaska Industrial Development & Export Authority.
Sadly, Governor and his then Chief of Staff mangled implementation of targeted cuts.
After six years under Governor Dunleavy, we’re spending more, our savings are in jeopardy and the PFD is getting chiseled away.
Mike Dunleavy not taking counsel from Donna Arduin was a missed opportunity and the third dumbest thing he’s done right after listening to Craig Richards on how to manage our Permanent Fund and his decision to putting Adam Crumb in as the Commissioner of the Department of Revenue – the guy who couldn’t even figure out how to hand out food stamps using federal funds.
Oh well ….,,,
Budget Rock Star!! My God, must read alaska is making my day! Nothing like starting your day with a ripsnorter of a belly laugh! Thanks Suzanne!