A brutally dangerous budget bill and how you can help stop it

By Dawnell Smith

Congress is misusing a budget process to try to push through industrial projects in Alaska that would enrich foreign corporations while devastating public lands, polluting water and air, and diminishing the food resources and health of local people.

Representative Jared Huffman speaking during budget reconciliation markup about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The budget reconciliation process should grapple solely with budget issues, like taxes and programs that require funding or that generate significant funds. Instead, Congress is using the process to make significant cuts to vital social programs to pay for tax cuts for predominantly wealthy people while throwing in pet projects that don’t pencil out.

Here’s what Republicans are attempting to do in the budget bill: mandate oil and gas leasing of sacred lands in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; mandate oil and gas leasing in important areas in the western Arctic; and seeking to push through the authorization of the proposed Ambler industrial road.

The western Arctic. Courtesy of www.protectthearctic.org.

A reckless Congress driven by a Republican monolith held together by threats and loyalty oaths is now poised to pass this undemocratic, deceptive, and oppressive budget bill that  inherently undermines good decision-making and will make it much more difficult to protect Alaska landscapes and communities.

Now’s the time to sign on with Protect the Arctic to urge legislators to do the right thing by removing these provisions.

Alaska loses when Congress tries to pay for a $4.5 trillion tax cut to benefit the wealthy

Why would Congress use the budget process to try to make these provisions law? To avoid needing 60 votes in the Senate (the budget process requires a simple majority) because they know that their policies are deeply unpopular.

Ambler River headwaters. Photo by Ken Hill NPS

Let’s look at the Ambler road proposal, a project that would require Alaskans to subsidize a 220-mile industrial gravel road through the southern Brooks Range to benefit speculative Canadian and Australian mining corporations that would extract mostly copper—already plentiful in the U.S.—to export to nations like China.  Say what?

Plus, the road would cut through a national preserve, disrupt caribou migrations, pollute the region, and threaten the fish and other food resources and ways of life of local communities, which robustly oppose this road because of how dramatically it would impact their ways of life, access to food, and health. At least ninety Tribes have passed or signed onto resolutions opposing the project because of the harm this road would do to caribou, fish, land, water, air, and cultural practices.

The Western Arctic Caribou Herd on its annual migration through Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. Photo courtesy of Lisa Oakley

In 2024, the Interior Department engaged in an environmental review and analysis of impacts that led Interior to cancel the permits issued in 2020 due to the threat of significant harm to the region.

But Sen. Sullivan and the GOP tried to shove the Ambler road into the National Defense Authorization Act in 2025. That effort failed because the Ambler road has nothing to do with national defense—copper is readily available in the U.S.

Now, the GOP has plunked the Ambler road proposal into the tax bill, disregarding the agency analysis and the knowledge and concerns raised by the Arctic communities that would be most harmed by this fiscally shady road proposal. The bill  would also prohibit any judicial review except by the State of Alaska—also something that has absolutely nothing to do with budget issues.

You can take action now. Tell congress to say no to Ambler road.

An unseemly obsession

Within Alaska, the dynamics get even sketchier. The Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority—a state agency designed to issue bonds to support economic activity—operates with little transparency and legislative oversight while hoarding millions of dollars that Alaskans need right now for vital public services like K-12 education.

AIDEA, the entity pushing the Ambler Road, obsessively sinks millions and millions of dollars into projects like the Ambler road proposal, yet has no mechanism for reimbursing Alaska and is not held accountable for its bad decisions and terrible returns on investment.   Instead of allowing AIDEA to sink more money into this project and other duds, that money should be put toward other state programs in dire need of funding, like education.

Reports show again and again that AIDEA’s funding of boondoggle projects costs Alaskans dearly and that money would be better invested in things like small Alaska businesses, education and public service, and the Permanent Fund Dividend.

Turning Alaska into an industrial zone

Images courtesy of Florian Schulz and Alaska Wilderness League.

The federal budget bill also further pushes for needless oil and gas leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the western Arctic, mandating four lease sales in the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge—an area known as “the place where life begins” to the Gwich’in Nation of Alaska and Canada—and a lease sale every other year in the National Petroleum Preserve-Alaska.

Worse yet, these mandates attempt to let oil and gas corporations skirt established environmental protections by eliminating judicial oversight.

Arctic National Wildlife Refuge near the Canning River Delta. Photo courtesy of USGS.

Two prior lease sales in the Arctic Refuge that yielded only a fraction of one percent of promised revenues in the original budget reconciliation that passedthese tax cuts in 2017, prove that the oil industry has no interest in drilling in the Arctic Refuge. The industry is making a ton of money where it’s at and there is no national oil and gas emergency, just the politics of myth and sleight of hand intended to pass public lands to private interests.

A report by the Center for American Progress explains how the current budget bill would do absolutely nothing for Alaskans and Americans, but would benefit corporations.

“Mandating reckless lease sales on public lands and waters will not  lower gasoline or energy prices or increase American energy security,” states the report. “But it will ensure that U.S. public lands and waters are prioritized for oil and gas while sacrificing public health and displacing recreation, wildlife habitat, renewable energy, and other uses.”

We must protect Alaska every single day, and today it’s more important than ever to do that with Protect the Arctic.