Michael Tavoliero: Alaska’s future under bureaucratic drift — the quiet surrender

By MICHAEL TAVOLIERO

A decade from now, Alaska may look very different. Not in its natural grandeur, its mountains, waters, and wilderness will endure, but in its governance, its culture of independence, and the fate of the people who once defined its frontier spirit for all of America.

The political dynamics unfolding in Juneau during the special session are not just procedural skirmishes between a governor and a legislature. They are the early contours of a much larger transformation: the quiet, cumulative centralization of authority under an increasingly bureaucratic state. And unless deliberately reversed, this transformation will define the next generation’s prospects and the twilight years of today’s elders.

In the 2025 special session, the Alaska Legislature’s swift override of Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s vetoes signaled more than a policy disagreement. It was an outright dismissal of structural reform in education. The $200 Base Student Allocation increase, passed without any concurrent policy changes, entrenched the status quo. Gov. Dunleavy had offered a compromise: increased funding in exchange for movement on school choice, charter school expansion, and tribal compacting. These were forward-looking ideas meant to diversify education pathways and empower communities. Instead, they were ignored.

A decade from now, the children educated under this system will face its full consequences. Locked into rigid public structures with little incentive to innovate or improve, Alaska’s education system may fall further behind. The next generation, especially in rural and Native communities, will be less prepared for a modern workforce, less equipped with civic understanding, and less capable of resisting the pull of dependence on state welfare systems. The iron curtain of educational bureaucracy will have succeeded in building a generation that trusts the system not because it works, but because it’s all they’ve known.

For Alaska’s senior population, this political moment is a betrayal. These are the same men and women who carved lives from the tundra, built businesses, worked the pipelines, and governed their families and communities with grit and integrity. They came to Alaska or were born here for the promise of autonomy, economic, personal, and political. But today, that promise is dissolving.

The denial or dilution of the Permanent Fund dividend is more than a fiscal decision. It represents the state’s gradual breach of an unspoken social contract. At the same time, healthcare and welfare systems have expanded not with reform or innovation, but with blind inertia. A slow, administrative creep replaces real care with red tape, and real freedom with institutional compliance. Seniors, already overburdened by complex healthcare systems and increasing costs of living, find themselves surrendering, not through choice, but through exhaustion.

As Thomas Hobbes foresaw in Leviathan, a massive, unresponsive state does not have to arrive through violence. It can come through complacency, convenience, and unchecked authority. In Alaska, this shift has emerged through:

1. Judicial Imposition – Courts increasingly set policy that supersedes legislative intent and local self-governance.
2. Popular Surrender – Through ranked-choice voting and limited civic engagement, the public has voted (often unknowingly) for systems that erode their own influence, freedom and future.
3. Administrative Bloat – Agencies and bureaucrats now hold more practical power than elected officials, crafting rules that evade democratic accountability.

Together, these forces construct a quiet Leviathan, against which resistance feels futile and reform nearly impossible.

By 2035, the results of this centralization will be clear:

• Local government will have less say in critical areas like education, zoning, and economic development, as state agencies expand their regulatory over-reach.
• Young Alaskans who remain in the state will be less mobile, both economically and intellectually, trained to navigate bureaucracy rather than to challenge or improve it. While those many who leave will not return.
• Seniors will be increasingly marginalized, their once-central voices muted in policy conversations, their benefits eroded, and their wealth transferred through inflationary policy and tax creep.

The Alaska of tomorrow will still boast its wild beauty, but without decisive action, its people risk losing something far more vital: the belief that they are sovereign over their own lives and communities. For decades, statutes like Title 29 and Title 14 have steadily undermined the constitutional vision of strong, locally accountable governments, replacing autonomy with top-down mandates and bureaucratic sprawl.

Education has become a machine serving special interests rather than students; the Permanent Fund Dividend, once a symbol of shared wealth, has been hijacked by political gamesmanship; and overlapping regulations stifle development while growing welfare programs consume the state’s budget. Reform is no longer optional. It is survival.

The 2026 election is a pivotal moment. Alaska can either align with a potential national conservative resurgence that favors deregulation, constitutional integrity, and energy development or it will be left behind by its Leftist political establishment content with stagnation and the death of sovereignty. 

Alaskans must seize this moment to demand bold changes: repeal ranked-choice voting, unleash true school choice, enshrine and restore the PFD, overhaul permitting laws, and return power to local governments as Article X intended. Most of all, voters must reject the comfort of bureaucracy and rediscover the courage that built this state through participation, awareness, and an unshakable insistence on transparency, accountability, and self-governance.