Politics
Congress’s Fight Over Trump’s Agenda Runs Through Alaska
Twice a month, planes land on the gravel airstrip in Noatak, Alaska, about 70 miles north of the Arctic Circle, carrying the diesel that residents need to heat their homes in the bitter cold.
And once a month, they receive electricity bills four times higher than those for most of the rest of the country that include two separate charges: one for the cost of the energy itself, and another for the cost of the fuel used to fly it there.
“The fuel cost is the thing that kills,” Bessie Monroe, 56, who works as an assistant to the village’s tribal administrator, said as she pulled up her bill. Even though she supplements the heat from her generator with a wood-burning stove — and can still sometimes feel the chill of wind through one of her walls — Ms. Monroe has paid roughly $250 a month for electricity for her small one-bedroom house this winter.
So a few years ago, in an effort to build a local source of electricity and save residents money, the Inupiat village of 500 worked with its utility company to install a small farm of solar panels. And when Congress approved new tax credits for clean energy projects in 2022 through the Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the village saw an opportunity to buy more.
But the fate of the project — and dozens more like it in Alaska and around the country — is now in doubt, leaving villagers unsure of their financial future.
Those doubts are at the root of an intraparty feud unfolding among Republicans in Washington, where G.O.P. members of Congress are casting about for ways to pay for President Trump’s domestic agenda. Some fiscal hard-liners have zeroed in on clean energy tax credits as a prime target for elimination.
Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, has become an outspoken proponent of keeping the tax credits.
“A wholesale repeal, or the termination of certain individual credits, would create uncertainty, jeopardizing long-term project planning and job creation in the energy sector,” Ms. Murkowski and three other Republicans wrote in a letter to the Senate majority leader last month to make the case for preserving the clean energy breaks.
The calls to scrap them have already had an effect. The leading builder of solar farms along Alaska’s Railbelt, the state’s most populous region, cited uncertainty over the tax credits’ future when it pulled out of a major project. Dozens more projects have been left in limbo after Mr. Trump signed an executive order in January to freeze federal grants financed by the law.
And all of it comes as Alaskans prepare for looming natural gas supply shortfalls, which have prompted state officials to warn of the possibility of rolling blackouts.
“It seemed like two, three years ago, there was a lot of enthusiasm moving forward with a lot of these projects,” said Matt Bergan, an engineer who worked for the electric association based in the hub city of Kotzebue, 50 miles south of Noatak.
“We know what we need up here,” Mr. Bergan continued. “We need the wind and the solar and the storage to make heat, and get away from diesel fuel. And the stars were aligning. These big federal dollars were going to be coming through. We got our projects shovel-ready to go. And now all the stars are have unaligned.”
Similar stories are playing out all across the country. But nowhere has the law had a more profound effect on everyday access to power than in Alaska, where energy companies have sought to leverage the tax credits to build out renewable energy infrastructure in isolated communities.
“There is still a substantial amount of money that has to come out of pocket in order to make these projects work,” said Bill Stamm, the chief executive of Alaska Electric Village Cooperative, a nonprofit electric utility serving residents in 59 locations throughout rural Alaska, including Noatak. “If you can get some of that money back, especially for folks that have a tax appetite — that I think, swayed the movers and shakers, the folks that are going to decide, ‘Do we want to actually get involved in this kind of business?’”
At an event last month in Anchorage, Ms. Murkowski recounted a conversation she had had with the interior secretary, Doug Burgum, in which he commented there would be little support from the Trump administration for wind energy projects.
“Remember that so many of the communities in the state of Alaska are never going to benefit from a natural gas pipeline,” Ms. Murkowski recounted replying. “It’s not going to do a spur out to Togiak. It’s not going to do a spur out to Kobuk. So please, please don’t forget the opportunities that come to our more rural communities that are more isolated, who need to be able to access the resources that are there.”
Even simple tasks in Noatak are often difficult. For years, the utility company servicing the village would send some diesel by barge during the spring and summer months. But the Noatak River’s water levels have since dropped so low that the utility can now only fly in the fuel. There are no roads to Noatak, and the closest city, Kotzebue, population 3,000, is more than an hour away by all-terrain vehicle.
“You could probably get to Hawaii as cheap as you can get to Noatak from Anchorage,” said Mr. Stamm, the utility executive. “So it’s not insignificant that we have to fly people there to do repairs. We have to fly all of our material in there to do repairs.”
Late last year, the planes used to fly in the diesel suffered mechanical issues and were grounded for weeks. The village rationed diesel for residents, forcing many, like Ms. Monroe, to rely heavily on their wood-burning stoves. It was 25 to 35 degrees below zero then, she and other residents recalled.
“It happens a lot, fuel shortages,” said Tristen Ashby, the village’s tribal administrator. “And some people don’t have wood stoves up here, so they only have one source of heat.”
The cold in the winters, Mr. Ashby added, “is like you wouldn’t believe.”
During that shortage, Ms. Monroe ran out of the wood she asks her 20-year-old daughters to chop. “I was asking, ‘Lord, I need wood today.’ Later on, there were two logs outside of my house. I walked out and there were two logs. And that was a humbling experience.”
When diesel is accessible, its fumes linger in the air over residential streets.
“When I came into this office, I asked the previous administrator, who got us the solar panels, ‘How could I get another farm?’” said Mr. Ashby, who, at 22, is the youngest person to ever serve as tribal administrator. “With solar energy, there’s no fuel emission. Every day we see smoke coming out of the plant.”
But the real reason he hopes to pivot to solar energy, he said, is to bring down costs.
While the average residential electricity rate in the United States is around 16 cents per kilowatt-hour, Noatak pays more than a dollar. On a recent visit, heating fuel was running $13 a gallon.
Some larger homes cost $1,700 month to heat, and residents say it is not uncommon for them to pay their electric bills in installments. Robbie Kirk, who lives in Noatak in a house he built himself, recalled receiving a $2,500 electricity bill one month about seven years ago, when the temperature sunk to negative 60 and stayed there for weeks.
That often presents tough decisions. Mr. Kirk described how he and others each winter must decide whether to heat their water line. If they do, it drives up their electric bill. If they don’t, the pipe could freeze and burst.
The more common trade-off, he said, is deciding between spending money on heating fuel or gasoline for the ATVs and snow machines they use to drive across the snow-covered gravel roads that cut through the village. Around 5 p.m. each day, just before the single gas pump at the village store closes, a small line forms. On a recent Thursday afternoon, Tianna Sage was filling up her brother’s snow machine so he could use it to go duck hunting. She said she would need to refuel it every day for him, at the cost of $11 a gallon.
“I work three jobs to make sure the struggle is not there,” Mr. Kirk said. “But I have a lot of family here, a lot of widowed uncles, widowed aunts that they’re not able to, just not physically able to. So just watching them struggle with those decisions on whether they should buy heating fuel or buy gas. That determines — I don’t want to say how well they live their life — but how much easier it could be.”
Sitting in her office, Ms. Monroe said she still had hope that Congress would preserve the federal support for villages like Noatak. She said she would worry about her daughters’ ability to pay their bills each month if some kind of change did not come.
“Our future, it doesn’t look good, per se, with the cost of living right now,” she said. “I start to realize that all this is going to come upon them. They’re going to have to carry the burden of heating their homes or buying food.”
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By Vivian Yee, Christina Shaman, Lauren Pruitt, James Surdam and Melanie Bencosme
June 18, 2026
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FIRST ON FOX: Americans are nearly evenly split between favoring Iranian regime change and a negotiated U.S. settlement with Iran, according to a new survey.
Some 39% of respondents favor a negotiated settlement where Iran’s current government remains in place, with verifiable limits on its nuclear and missile programs, according to the findings of the Reagan Institute Summer Survey, while 36% favor replacing Iran’s current government with one more favorable to the U.S.
Another 16% favor a weakened regime where the current government stays in place but is significantly diminished militarily and economically, and 8% responded that they don’t know.
The findings underscore the political challenge facing President Donald Trump as his administration pursues a newly signed memorandum of understanding with Iran. While the agreement seeks to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions through negotiations, Americans remain divided over the ultimate objective of U.S. policy toward the Islamic Republic.
Americans are nearly evenly split between favoring Iranian regime change and a negotiated U.S. settlement with Iran, according to a new survey. (Mandel NGAN / AFP via Getty Images)
AMERICANS AGREE WITH TRUMP THAT IRAN POSES THREAT TO UNITED STATES: POLL
Republicans who responded to the survey favored replacing Iran’s government by a 2-to-1 margin over a diplomatic deal.
Republicans were far more likely than Democrats to favor a more aggressive outcome in Iran. Half of Republican respondents said they would prefer to see Iran’s current government replaced with one more favorable to the United States, compared to 25% who said they would favor a negotiated settlement that leaves the regime in place in exchange for verifiable limits on its nuclear and missile programs.
The findings were nearly identical among self-identified MAGA Republicans, 51% of whom favored regime change while 25% backed a negotiated settlement.
SHARP PARTISAN DIVIDE EMERGES OVER IRAN STRIKE, TRUMP’S STRATEGY: POLLS
Democrats, meanwhile, largely favored diplomacy. A majority, 52%, said they would prefer a negotiated settlement with Iran’s current government, while 25% favored regime change. Another 14% favored leaving the regime in place but significantly weakened militarily and economically.
The Reagan Institute Summer Survey was conducted May 26 through June 3 among 1,555 respondents nationwide and carries a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. The survey used a mixed-mode methodology that included live telephone interviews, an online panel and text-to-web responses.
Smoke rises over Tehran following an explosion amid ongoing U.S. and Israeli military strikes on Iranian targets on March 2, 2026. (Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)
The findings underscore the political challenge facing President Donald Trump as his administration pursues a newly signed memorandum of understanding with Iran. (Hamid FOROUTAN / ISNA / AFP via Getty Images)
Republicans were far more likely than Democrats to favor a more aggressive outcome in Iran. (Pool via WANA/Reuters)
To better reflect the U.S. population, the results were weighted using demographic benchmarks from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2023 American Community Survey, including age, gender, race, region and education levels. The poll also included an oversample of 331 MAGA Republicans under age 30, a group with a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.
The Reagan Institute is a Washington-based policy organization that advocates the Reagan foreign-policy tradition of “peace through strength” and sustained American leadership abroad.
The findings come as Trump has defended a newly signed memorandum of understanding with Iran as a way to reduce tensions and create a pathway toward a broader agreement addressing Tehran’s nuclear program.
The memorandum establishes a 60-day negotiating period during which the United States and Iran will attempt to reach a more comprehensive deal. The agreement also includes provisions aimed at restoring commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and provides limited sanctions waivers tied to continued negotiations. Several of the most contentious issues, including the long-term future of Iran’s nuclear program, are expected to be addressed in subsequent talks.
Trump has described the arrangement as a means of avoiding a wider conflict while pursuing what he called a “great settlement” with Tehran. He has also argued that the agreement could help stabilize energy markets by reopening the Strait of Hormuz, a critical global shipping route, while creating an opportunity to negotiate additional restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activities.
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The president added that he agreed to a settlement to avoid “economic catastrophe.”
“I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have happened,” he told reporters at the G7 Summit in France.
WASHINGTON — The White House pushed back Thursday against growing bipartisan criticism of a negotiated settlement to the war with Iran, arguing its concessions to the Islamic Republic were contingent on its conduct and essential to securing peace.
The administration’s defensive posture came as details of the framework agreement, known as a memorandum of understanding, were finally shared with the public, revealing a raft of compromises with Tehran long opposed by Republicans.
Vice President JD Vance, who helped negotiate the deal, told reporters Thursday that the deal was structured to reward Iran for good behavior. But the text of the agreement suggests otherwise.
The Trump administration agreed to release billions of dollars in Iranian assets that were frozen and restricted by the United States “upon the implementation” of the memorandum — before any further actions are taken or additional negotiations begin. The president will issue sanctions waivers on Iranian oil, allowing Tehran to resume trading its most valuable export and breaking with decades of policy. And to facilitate that trade, boosting Tehran’s revenues, Trump agreed to immediately end a U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports.
Still more concessions were offered to the Iranians, including a commitment by the U.S. administration to establish a fund of “at least $300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic” — in effect providing reparations for the war Trump started.
“All required licenses, waivers and permissions needed for the relevant financial transactions will be granted by the United States of America,” the memorandum reads.
Taken together, the document reads as a stunning reversal of U.S. policy toward Iran after decades of concern across administrations in Washington — including throughout Trump’s two terms — that the Islamic Republic represents the nation’s greatest security threats as the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism.
Criticism from Republican senators, in particular, has been sharp and swift.
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the $300-billion fund “would make Iran’s payoff under President Obama’s 2015 deal look like a pittance by comparison.” And Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) accused the Trump administration of giving Iran money it would use to kill Americans.
“History demonstrates that giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is an exceptionally bad idea, and I think, unfortunately, the president is receiving some really bad advice on this deal,” Cruz said. “I don’t want to see us send a penny to the ayatollah. And I hope that we don’t.”
The Obama-era deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, included structured sanctions relief for Iran in exchange for concrete and verifiable steps by Tehran to dismantle much of its nuclear program — a framework that Republicans broadly criticized at the time.
By contrast, Trump’s agreement commits the United States to pursuing economic relief for Iran while providing no clarity about the future of Iran’s nuclear program — the very issue Trump cited as the rationale for launching the war.
The memorandum includes a pledge by Iran to never purchase or construct nuclear weapons — a vow the Islamic Republic has made multiple times before, including by signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, in a religious edict issued by the late supreme leader and in the Obama-era nuclear accord.
Vice President JD Vance speaks to reporters at the White House on June 18, 2026.
(Manuel Balce Ceneta / Associated Press)
Detailed negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program — including whether Tehran could continue domestic uranium enrichment, at what level, and under what monitoring regime — were left for another day.
For more than a decade, the U.S. intelligence community has assessed that Iran sought a threshold nuclear capability, securing the strategic advantages of a nuclear power without incurring the costs of openly pursuing a bomb.
The agreement does include a commitment by Iran to do its “best” to bring commercial shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital international waterway, back to prewar levels. But critics of the president said he had to make deep, historic concessions just to secure a status quo ante upended by the war he started. And in the document, Tehran agreed to refrain from imposing a toll on ships transiting the strait for only a 60-day period.
“Unless you were homeschooled by a day drinker, no one’s confident that Iran is going to do anything,” Sen. John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, told reporters this week.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, Kennedy’s Republican counterpart from Louisiana, called the deal “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades” that would have President Reagan “rolling over in his grave.”
“Iran’s nuclear ambitions were not curbed, and they have learned that threatening the Strait of Hormuz works and will undoubtedly leverage it in the future. Now, Iran gets to build brand-new infrastructure under this deal,” Cassidy said.
“Before the war, the strait was open, Iran was being crushed by sanctions, and 13 service members were still alive,” he added. “Now, 13 Americans are dead, families have paid billions at the pump, sanctions will be lifted, and the bombing has stopped.”
Despite mounting criticism, Trump put his signature to the memorandum on Wednesday night while attending a dinner with the French president in Versailles, a palace infamous for hosting a treaty signing that disgraced Germany at the end of the First World War.
He defended the agreement while in Europe and suggested further concessions might be forthcoming, including recognition of Iran’s claimed right to enrich uranium and a new willingness to tolerate its continued ballistic missile development — another program that Trump had vowed to eliminate as a central war aim.
“He took America to war — killing 13 soldiers, thousands of Iranian civilians and costing taxpayers $60 billion — to get rid of Iran’s missile program. And now that he’s lost the war, he pretends like it’s no big deal,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut.
“Just unforgivable,” he added. “What a charlatan.”
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