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US Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) has come to the conclusion that she may have been cheated by the Trump administration. “I feel like we made a deal and then, hours later, a deal was made to somebody else.”

Murkowski is referring to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which cuts almost $500 billion in US clean energy spending. Murkowski was the deciding vote on the bill that extends Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, funds his immigration crackdown, and imposes work requirements on social safety net programs.

Murkowski threw her support to the OBBBA after Congress agreed to protect Alaskan wind and solar projects, which had been threatened with funding cuts for months. A longtime, strong advocate for oil and gas development in Alaska, Murkowski also favors a broad energy approach that includes solar, wind, and hydropower.

After her OBBBA vote, Trump failed to follow through — surprise! — and instead, issued an executive order to limit solar and wind project awards. Continuing to insist that renewables provide only intermittent — and, by implication, unreliable — power, the executive order also gives a nod of approval to polluting options such as oil, natural gas, and hydropower.

Murkowski had been under the impression that Trump administration officials understood how local wind and solar projects could offset the costly diesel fuel that many Alaskan rural communities must import by barge to provide electricity for their homes and businesses.

Originally, Murkowski interpreted her behind-the-scenes negotiations as part of a “hard-won fight” for a clean energy provision. She had initially supported the OBBBA in order to lessen what is becoming an energy crisis along the Railbelt in Alaska; locally produced natural gas from Cook Inlet no longer fulfills the energy needs of the Railbelt grid.

“It’s not everything that I wanted,” she explained then, “but it’s going to keep some of our projects alive, and that’s important.”

Just a few weeks after her deciding OBBBA vote, Murkowski has now adjusted her position. “To me, it’s just reckless by the administration,” and points to an inevitable repeal of the tax credits. “Do I feel like the administration was not being up-front with us? Yes.”

Now she fears that utility companies will view “this latest signal out of the administration, and they’re going to say it’s just going to be too hard to do.” The result will be a “retreat from this window of of opportunity to build out and say, ‘Well, I guess we’re just going to have to bank on LNG imports.’” Cutting the tax credits will delete far more value for people in the US than they cost the federal budget.

Murkowski insists that the BBB continues to be a win for Alaska due to elements like a new royalty sharing mechanism in which Alaska will be the recipient of oil production revenue on federal lands — eight years from now. She also managed to negotiate a measure to protect a 12-month window for the projects to receive tax credits, despite efforts by some Republicans to immediately eliminate them.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum will now personally sign off on even routine activities for wind and solar projects on federal land and waters. Many anticipated private renewable energy projects in Alaska require federal area access; now those will be delayed or even stopped completely.

“If you were looking for something proof-positive that the administration is looking to literally cut off a sector of the energy industry,” Murkowski concluded, “it couldn’t be more compelling than” Trump’s executive order and the Burgum directive.

The senior Senator from Alaska now feels that the Trump decision is “just a total affront to what we had negotiated,” as reported by the Anchorage Daily News. She said the executive order “just pulls the rug out from from underneath the deal” she’d made for the yearlong window for tax credits, which were a way to make sure “that the most vulnerable in our communities are not made more vulnerable by the provisions in this bill.” (Of course, the Biden administration’s tax credit window was several years longer as designated under the Democrat-sponsored 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.)

Murkowski Now Faces the Deal She Made With The Devil

A nuanced look into how the OBBBA affects the vulnerable portion of the Alaskan population shows the fallacy of Murkowski’s rationale.

The Republican wing of the Senate asked its members “to look to Medicaid” for OBBBA funding cuts. That target “was hard for us in Alaska,” Murkowski acknowledged, as Alaska has both a high Medicaid population and a high SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) population. She eventually pivoted, pointing out that “those numbers are increasing” and wondering aloud where “fair and reasonable reforms” might occur.

Targeting the weakest members of the population, Murkowski admits that “I happen to think that work requirements are not something that we should shy from.”

Such comments mark Murkowski as no more trustworthy than Trump or his merry pranksters.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the OBBBA will cut federal spending on Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) benefits by $1.02 trillion, due in part to eliminating at least 10.5 million people from the programs by 2034. With new federal limits on Medicaid eligibility likely increasing the number of uninsured, along with other provisions that restrict states’ ability to raise revenue to fund their Medicaid programs, states will have to reevaluate their budgets to either supplement the spending or cut services.

That means you, too, Alaskan lawmakers. Thank your Senator for that one.

The OBBBA requires individuals to prove that they are working, engaging in community service, or receiving work training for at least 80 hours per month — or that they are enrolled in school part time — unless they qualify for an exemption. Yet research shows that those who are not working are statistically more likely to be older women who left the workforce to care for aging parents or children. Are there no workhouses? (with apologies to Charles Dickens).

Roughly one-third of the $186 billion in SNAP cuts also come from shifting a larger portion of food and administrative costs to the states. The stated reason for the cost shift is to incentivize states to lower error rates, which are calculated based on both overpayments and underpayments by states to recipients. Alaska has the highest SNAP error rate in the country, as Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) noted in today’s Washington Post.

Doesn’t efficiency begin at home, Senator Murkowski?