By Michael Tavoliero
Why are we Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, and the remaining thoughtful groups that are sick and tired of being sick and tired with Alaska politics not telling Alaska’s political leadership to stop this fool’s parade and seriously approach a winning strategy for the legislature?
Keep in mind: A Decade of Failure by Incompetence:
2015 – Medicaid Expansion by Executive Action
Governor Walker expanded Medicaid without direct legislative approval, and the Legislature failed to stop it. Alaska inherited a larger permanent entitlement structure, future state costs, and a deeper health-care bureaucracy.
2016 – Education Funding Without Reform
Lawmakers continued funding the existing education system without requiring performance accountability, administrative reform, school choice, consolidation, or measurable student outcomes.
2017 – Oil Tax Policy Without Strategy
HB 111 ended cashable oil tax credits, but Alaska still failed to adopt a durable resource strategy for production, revenue, investment stability, and fiscal discipline.
2018 – PFD Cuts Institutionalized
The POMV framework normalized using Permanent Fund earnings for government operations and turned the statutory PFD into an annual budget bargaining chip.
2019 – Criminal Justice Reversal Without Repair
HB 49 rolled back SB 91 under public pressure, but did not solve addiction, homelessness, prosecution gaps, repeat offenders, mental health failures, or reentry problems.
2020 – COVID Spending Without Lasting Oversight Reform
CARES Act funds exposed confusion over emergency spending authority, legislative control, audits, and transparency. Alaska spent the money but failed to build better emergency-budget rules.
2021 – Federal Dependency Deepens
ARPA money expanded Alaska’s reliance on federal funds, tying more state, local, school, and nonprofit priorities to Washington’s rules and temporary funding streams.
2022 – Education Industry Capture Continues
Despite poor student outcomes, the Legislature again treated funding as reform while avoiding competition, school-level autonomy, administrative caps, and parental control.
2023 – Ranked-Choice Voting Becomes the Shield
After adoption in 2020 and use in 2022, lawmakers avoided a serious review of voter confusion, ballot exhaustion, party displacement, and whether the system still had public consent.
2024 – Statehood Erodes Under Federal Control
Federal restrictions on Alaska land, resources, roads, and energy development continued, while state leaders mostly responded after the damage was done.
2025 – More Spending, More Control, Less Accountability
The Legislature pushed education increases without enforceable performance reform, advanced election-law changes under the banner of modernization, drifted toward energy policies that risk higher costs, and again treated the statutory PFD as government’s balancing account.
2026 – The Pattern Continues
Public-pension revival efforts, unresolved election reform, reduced PFDs, and continued fiscal avoidance show the same governing pattern: short-term relief, institutional protection, federal dependency, and procedural games instead of structural reform.
Bottom Line
The decade’s failure is not that every proposal was malicious. Some were sincere.
The real problem is worse: Alaska’s political class repeatedly chooses temporary fixes and institutional self-protection over reform, then transfers the future cost to families, taxpayers, children, and grandchildren. Without a governing strategy tied to measurable results, the Legislature will keep doing what it does best: redistributing state money through grants, programs, and favored institutions that then become political constituencies for the same legislators who fund them.
Alaska’s FY2025 grant system moved roughly $2.7 billion through state agencies to outside entities, nonprofits, local governments, service providers, and advocacy-linked organizations. Some do useful work, but the larger pattern is obvious: public money creates dependency, dependency creates political loyalty, and political loyalty helps incumbents get re-elected.
That is not reform. It is taxpayer-funded political maintenance. If Alaska wants different results, all state funding must be tied to measurable outcomes, independent audits, sunset reviews, and consequences for failure. Otherwise, the system will continue recycling public money into institutional support for the status quo while families, children, and future taxpayers are left paying the bill.
Unless we, Alaska voters, realize we are no longer operating in a traditional democratic-republic election process, taxpayer-funded political maintenance will continue as Alaska’s norm, not the exception.
Since statehood, Alaska’s political system has been steadily reshaped into a progressive governing structure in which public money is used to build and protect political constituencies, ranked-choice voting diffuses accountability, and institutional networks increasingly outweigh clear voter mandates. This is no longer a simple contest of candidates, slogans, or campaign personalities. It is a contest over systems: who controls the money, the rules, the administrative machinery, the nonprofit networks, the unions, the media narrative, and the election structure itself.
Until conservatives and non-progressives recognize that the battlefield has changed, we will continue treating elections like beauty pageants (Note our current Republican gubernatorial race. Silly, isn’t it?) while the other side treats them like systems engineering. That is why we keep losing ground even when public sentiment is with us. The lesson is blunt: a movement that only campaigns, but does not build durable institutions, cannot defeat a political machine that governs through them.
