Fifty percent of Alaska’s economic growth from 2015 to 2023 came from one source
Not oil, which added perhaps $4.5 billion over that stretch; not mining or fishing, which together added less than a quarter of that; but federal spending, which grew by nearly $9 billion over those years, against roughly $16.5 billion in total state GDP growth
Those numbers come from a June forum Commonwealth North co-hosted with ISER and Build Alaska’s Future, where three University of Alaska researchers sized Washington’s role in our economy. What they found should get attention. What they couldn’t find should get more
Here is the problem: The federal spending data stops at 2023. Nobody, including the researchers who study this for a living, can say with confidence what the federal government spent in Alaska last year. ISER holds federal grants itself and struggles to learn the status of its own funding, relying on informal conversations with program officers. If the state’s premier economic research institute cannot track its own money, no one is tracking the other $20 billion
The one gauge still working tells a sobering story. Federal personnel records, recently pried loose, show Alaska’s federal civilian workforce fell 15.8% between April 2024 and April 2026, steeper than the national decline of 14.8%. Alaska ranks third among states in reliance on these workers, behind only Maryland and Hawaii. And the people leaving were not new hires. They were, on average, 10-year veterans: park rangers, biological technicians and the field workers who keep public lands functioning — and, with them, the tourism economy that depends on access to those lands.
So we can watch the experience walk out the door. We cannot see what is happening to the far larger flow of dollars that never touches a payroll: the grants and contracts that move through hospitals, contractors and Alaska Native corporations across the state
Alaskans can debate what the right level of federal presence should be. We cannot debate it well in the dark
This is where Alaska’s congressional delegation has standing, leverage and accountability. Federal reporting systems answer to Congress. A state where federal spending drove half of recent growth has a large stake in transparent, timely data. And a delegation that wants credit for Alaska’s federal share should want the gauges working most of all. You cannot point to a record that runs in the dark
Ross Johnstonis executive director ofCommonwealth North
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