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Alaska’s two U.S. senators both believe that President Donald Trump’s pro-development administration will be good for the state’s natural resource economy, creating jobs, boosting tax revenues and building long-term prosperity.
Both support the president’s initiatives to unlock resources that had been placed off-limits by the administration of Joe Biden and others before him.
And both want the federal government to operate efficiently and reduce spending.
Beyond those shared beliefs, however, the two came across as worlds apart in their annual speeches to the Alaska Legislature last week. Sen. Lisa Murkowski addressed a joint session of legislators on March 18, with Sen. Dan Sullivan standing at the microphone on March 20.
Murkowski talked with compassion about federal workers in Alaska who have been fired for no reason other than Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency believes a smaller workforce is a better workforce — regardless of whether enough people are left to do the important work, such as weather reports and fisheries research.
“At any human level, they’re traumatizing people, and they’re leaving holes in our communities,” the senator said of the mass terminations.
The firings are “being made regardless of performance, and with little understanding of the function and the value of each position,” Murkowski told legislators. “Public servants are not our enemies. … They are integral to our economy and to our ability to function as a state and as a country.”
The tag team budget wrestlers of Trump and Musk are reducing the federal workforce not with a paring knife but with a sledgehammer.
Each firing decision, often handed out by overnight email, “lacks the fundamental decency that you need when you’re dealing with real people,” the senator said.
Murkowski also voiced frustration over Trump’s wide-ranging federal funding freeze. “This is happening in a very indiscriminate manner, with very little understanding of what the projects mean to us for Alaska.”
Expansion of the Tyee Lake hydroelectric power station to serve Wrangell and Petersburg is among the many Alaska energy projects caught up in the freeze.
Sullivan, in his speech, acknowledged that firings “are difficult decisions” that should be done “humanely and not randomly.” But he could not muster much compassion or support for the workers or the programs eliminated or frozen by the president and his Firer-in-Chief Musk.
The senator said he would advocate for frozen federal programs and fired workers, with the note that his advocacy would be limited to cutbacks that threaten Alaska’s economy or public safety.
He added the condition that organizations hurt by the Trump/Musk decisions need to fill out a form for his office and explain how their federal programs boosted resource development in Alaska. He also has told fired employees to fill out a form.
Sullivan’s speech mostly filled out a form promoting resource development, with people on the second page. Murkowski’s speech heralded the prospect of better times for resource development in Alaska, while reminding legislators — and Alaskans — that people are an important resource too.
Sullivan, who is seeking reelection in 2026, called Trump’s sweeping executive order to boost resource development in Alaska “a dream maker.”
Yes, resource development can be good for Alaska. But so are good people.
Larry Persily is publisher of the Wrangell Sentinel.