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.”
Politics
Trump plans to meet with Venezuela opposition leader Maria Corina Machado next week
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President Donald Trump said on Thursday that he plans to meet with Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado in Washington next week.
During an appearance on Fox News’ “Hannity,” Trump was asked if he intends to meet with Machado after the U.S. struck Venezuela and captured its president, Nicolás Maduro.
“Well, I understand she’s coming in next week sometime, and I look forward to saying hello to her,” Trump said.
Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado waves a national flag during a protest called by the opposition on the eve of the presidential inauguration, in Caracas on January 9, 2025. (JUAN BARRETO/AFP via Getty Images)
This will be Trump’s first meeting with Machado, who the U.S. president stated “doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country” to lead.
According to reports, Trump’s refusal to support Machado was linked to her accepting the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, which Trump believed he deserved.
But Trump later told NBC News that while he believed Machado should not have won the award, her acceptance of the prize had “nothing to do with my decision” about the prospect of her leading Venezuela.
Politics
California sues Trump administration over ‘baseless and cruel’ freezing of child-care funds
California is suing the Trump administration over its “baseless and cruel” decision to freeze $10 billion in federal funding for child care and family assistance allocated to California and four other Democratic-led states, Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta announced Thursday.
The lawsuit was filed jointly by the five states targeted by the freeze — California, New York, Minnesota, Illinois and Colorado — over the Trump administration’s allegations of widespread fraud within their welfare systems. California alone is facing a loss of about $5 billion in funding, including $1.4 billion for child-care programs.
The lawsuit alleges that the freeze is based on unfounded claims of fraud and infringes on Congress’ spending power as enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“This is just the latest example of Trump’s willingness to throw vulnerable children, vulnerable families and seniors under the bus if he thinks it will advance his vendetta against California and Democratic-led states,” Bonta said at a Thursday evening news conference.
The $10-billion funding freeze follows the administration’s decision to freeze $185 million in child-care funds to Minnesota, where federal officials allege that as much as half of the roughly $18 billion paid to 14 state-run programs since 2018 may have been fraudulent. Amid the fallout, Gov. Tim Walz has ordered a third-party audit and announced that he will not seek a third term.
Bonta said that letters sent by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announcing the freeze Tuesday provided no evidence to back up claims of widespread fraud and misuse of taxpayer dollars in California. The freeze applies to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, the Social Services Block Grant program and the Child Care and Development Fund.
“This is funding that California parents count on to get the safe and reliable child care they need so that they can go to work and provide for their families,” he said. “It’s funding that helps families on the brink of homelessness keep roofs over their heads.”
Bonta also raised concerns regarding Health and Human Services’ request that California turn over all documents associated with the state’s implementation of the three programs. This requires the state to share personally identifiable information about program participants, a move Bonta called “deeply concerning and also deeply questionable.”
“The administration doesn’t have the authority to override the established, lawful process our states have already gone through to submit plans and receive approval for these funds,” Bonta said. “It doesn’t have the authority to override the U.S. Constitution and trample Congress’ power of the purse.”
The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Manhattan and marked the 53rd suit California had filed against the Trump administration since the president’s inauguration last January. It asks the court to block the funding freeze and the administration’s sweeping demands for documents and data.
Politics
Video: Trump Says ‘Only Time Will Tell’ How Long U.S. Controls Venezuela
new video loaded: Trump Says ‘Only Time Will Tell’ How Long U.S. Controls Venezuela
transcript
transcript
Trump Says ‘Only Time Will Tell’ How Long U.S. Controls Venezuela
President Trump did not say exactly how long the the United states would control Venezuela, but said that it could last years.
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“How Long do you think you’ll be running Venezuela?” “Only time will tell. Like three months. six months, a year, longer?” “I would say much longer than that.” “Much longer, and, and —” “We have to rebuild. You have to rebuild the country, and we will rebuild it in a very profitable way. We’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking oil. We’re getting oil prices down, and we’re going to be giving money to Venezuela, which they desperately need. I would love to go, yeah. I think at some point, it will be safe.” “What would trigger a decision to send ground troops into Venezuela?” “I wouldn’t want to tell you that because I can’t, I can’t give up information like that to a reporter. As good as you may be, I just can’t talk about that.” “Would you do it if you couldn’t get at the oil? Would you do it —” “If they’re treating us with great respect. As you know, we’re getting along very well with the administration that is there right now.” “Have you spoken to Delcy Rodríguez?” “I don’t want to comment on that, but Marco speaks to her all the time.”
January 8, 2026
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