DOGE Alaska: Anchorage Assembly awarded Alaska Black Caucus over $1 million in noncompetitive grants

Between 2021 and 2024, the Alaska Black Caucus went from penniless to getting more than $1.3 million in grants from the Anchorage Assembly. These were noncompetitive grants that no other group had the opportunity to participate in.

The biggest grant came from federal Covid funds, for $1, 023,648 for outreach to the black community and convince people to take the Covid vaccine. The Alaska Black Caucus didn’t have to compete for the grants. They were sole-source contracts.

The non-compete grants continued in 2022, 2023, and 2024. Earlier, the Assembly granted the group over $400,000 to buy a building for its activities.

There were also competitive grants that the Alaska Black Caucus has won over those years, including American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 funds:

The appropriations have no meaningful deliverables. The Alaska Black Caucus did create a website that contains various news items. In January, the site posted an informational article titled, “Billions of Federal Dollars Come Into Alaska – How does Black Owned Businesses get a piece of the pie?”

In 2121 the Assembly gave the group a piece of the taxpayer’s pie to buy a building and establish “The Equity Center,” which houses the Alaska Black Caucus and serves as a quasi-political headquarters. You can read about it at the group’s newsletter. The Equity Center is the kind of place that could be denied federal grants in 2025, due to the Trump Administration’s stated ban on funding discrimination.

Alaska Black Caucus, which is arguably a surrogate group for the Democrat Party, had disappeared for years, but when the federal money started flowing, the group popped back up and outperformed during the Biden Covid years. The lion’s share of the funding comes from federal taxpayers and future taxpayers who will owe these funds that the US government borrowed from bonds and took through taxes. Celeste Hodge Growden, the organization’s CEO, makes $72,500.

It appears the organization will require ongoing federal and municipal support to stay viable, however. Life support for the Alaska Black Caucus will come this year from the Anchorage Mayor’s Community Grants program; the application period for this year’s money opened Feb. 11 and closes on March 10. Mayor Suzanne LaFrance will be giving out $315,000 in taxpayer money to organizations that support her policy priorities.

Federal dollars may be harder to get, however, since the organization is discriminatory by nature, filling the “diversity, equity, inclusion” programming that is now eliminated from federal spending.

Examine Alaska Black Caucus IRS 990 filing for 2022 here.

Examine Alaska Black Caucus IRS 990 filing for 2021 here.