WASHINGTON — As the Trump administration freezes spending and hollows out federal offices, just identifying the extent of the impact is difficult, so lawmakers in Juneau and Washington D.C. are resorting to unusual means.
The U.S. Senate Indian Affairs Committee, chaired by Sen. Lisa Murkowski, turned to Facebook this week to gather information.
The committee said in a post that it wants to hear how federal workforce changes and executive orders are affecting Native communities.
“If your community is affected,” the post says, “please share your experiences and concerns by contacting us at oversight@indian.senate.gov.”
Senators usually have better methods of finding out what the government is up to. Murkowski said gathering information is just one of the goals. They’re also performing administrative triage.
“Some of it, quite honestly, is we’re listening to it and trying to see, ‘All right: Is this one that we can resolve right now with just a phone call?’” she said.
Murkowski said President Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, recently told Republican senators she doesn’t know about problem unless someone alerts her. Wiles invited Republican senators to call her when they can’t get specific funding unlocked, which, Murkowski said, is helpful.
“You hate to have to say that it’s project-by-project, case-by-case, but sometimes that happens,’ she said.
As for the Trump administration’s termination of federal workers in Alaska, Murkowski said her staffers are trying to compile a list but some agencies, like the National Park Service, are hard to track. She’s heard more about the Alaska terminations in the U.S. Forest Service. Somewhat more.
“I don’t even want to hazard a guess, but it’s over 50,” she said.
Murkowski said her staffers are hearing from Alaskans and trying to piece together information to “get some more fidelity to the numbers.” But it’s a moving target. Waves of terminations come almost daily, and then some are rescinded. A federal judge in San Francisco said Thursday the Trump administration’s firing of thousands of probationary employees is illegal, but the case is far from over.
That any U.S. senator — and Murkowski in particular — can’t get the data on federal job elimination in public land agencies shows how haphazard the government actions have been. In addition to chairing Indian Affairs, Murkowski chairs the Appropriations subcommittee that drafts the annual spending bills for the Park Service, the Forest Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, among other agencies.
Meanwhile, in Juneau, state Rep. Alyse Galvin of Anchorage has launched her own effort to learn the extent of Alaska’s federal job losses. She’s asking Alaskans who were fired from their federal jobs to fill out a Google form.
“‘Currently my family is in upheaval. We do not know if my income will continue from day to day,” one respondent wrote.
“My job was the culmination of decades of hard work, first to get a PhD … and then to do years of post-doctoral training,” reads another. “My wife is also a fed and may get sacked after 20 years of service. My children are incredibly anxious.”
“I found a place to rent in Palmer for this position,” another person wrote. “Spent two months working and moving in, thousands of dollars to relocate, and was terminated on week 8.”
Galvin said she plans to pass all the stories on to Murkowski, U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, and Congressman Nick Begich.
“We hope that it will better inform them and give them what they need, the fire under them, to stand up on the floor and talk about the person from Wasilla …and what they’ve done, what they used to do, how concerned they are for the losses to Alaska,” Galvin said.
So it goes in the early weeks of the second Trump administration. In the absence of hard data and a systematic approach, the hope is that a powerful anecdote can ward off federal havoc.
Reporter Eric Stone contributed to this report from Juneau.
The post How many Alaska feds were fired? Lacking data, lawmakers crowd-source for anecdotes. appeared first on World Online.
