Over 40 years ago as a budding New York Times reporter, I wrote a long article for the Times Sunday Magazine on Alaska Native Corporations (ANCs), which were created with seed money from the federal government to resolve long-standing land claims and give the state’s Native peoples “a chance to control their own economic and cultural destiny.”
Naturally then, it piqued my interest when Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth announced that he was “taking a sledgehammer” to a Small Business Administration (SBA) program that helps ANCs, calling it “the oldest DEI program in the federal government.”
A month later, the Senate held hearings on the SBA’s 8(a) program, established during the Nixon Administration and amended by Reagan to benefit ANCs and other American Indian businesses. At that hearing, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, noted that SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler said that President Trump’s executive order to end “wasteful government DEI programs” would not affect Alaska Natives or any American Indians.
At the same hearing, Katherine Carlton, an Inupiat and president of an ANC, said revenue from contracts under the SBA program helps pay dividends to shareholders, create jobs and develop economic opportunities in villages that desperately need it.
Why would Hegseth, who was presumably getting ready for war with Iran, attack federal programs created under two-term Republican administrations? Moreover, the ANCs, with 8(a) support, participate in three of the Trump administration’s top priorities — the Golden Dome missile-defense initiative, expanded domestic energy production and rare-earth mining to counter reliance on Chinese minerals.
During the first year of the Trump administration, one-quarter of the 4,300 firms in the SBA program were suspended, and only 65 new firms were accepted. Six days after Hegseth declared war on ANCs, the SBA attacked its own program as being a Biden “vehicle for partisan and DEI preferences in federal contracting — crowding out legitimate job creators, especially white men.”
The late Alaska Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, a dyed-in-the-wool conservative who helped open the 8(a) program to ANCs, would be surprised by attacks from fellow conservatives over this program. So too would Alaska Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, who, just weeks before Hegseth’s comments, praised ANCs for performing “mission-critical work for the federal government, particularly for the Department of Defense, with efficiency and speed.”
If so many prominent conservatives either helped create or have recently praised ANCs, why have modern MAGA types attacked the 8(a) program, and these Native entities, so viciously?
The answer might lie in MAGA policy networks that influence Trump allies. Last November, a right-wing advocacy group called the American Accountability Federation (AAF) launched the Alaska Influence Pipeline, which claims to uncover how nefarious “national progressive donor networks are reshaping Alaska’s development debate.”
In a recent memo, the AAF linked Native entities to “climate-transition frameworks” rather than “energy models that support large-scale economic growth.” The organization has also attacked other Indian tribes in Florida and California. But why did the AAF — founded in 2021 to “take a big handful of sand and throw it in the gears of the Biden administration,” according to its leader Tom Jones — pivot toward Alaska?
The AAF is a spinoff from the Conservative Partnership Initiative (CPI), founded in 2017 by Jim DeMint, the former Republican senator and former Heritage Foundation president. CPI has created a stable of MAGA entities: the America First Legal Foundation (initially led by Stephen Miller), the Center for Renewing America (former home to Russell Vought and Kash Patel), and the AAF, among others.
Tom Jones had worked for both DeMint and conservative Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, while AAF board member Brian Darling is another former Republican Senate aide. Now a lobbyist, Darling’s clients include a Chinese drone maker and the Shein Group, a controversial Chinese fast-fashion company.
The AAF evolved from attacking liberal appointees and civil servants on its “DEI Watchlist” to a MAGA sentry keeping “vigilant watch of the DC Swamp.” Its objective, it says, is “to protect the interests of the American people and expose the left’s efforts to obstruct, subvert and sabotage the America First conservative agenda.”
Considering the organization’s top operators are known for slimy pressure tactics and engineering pay-to-play schemes, Democrats and Republicans alike should know better than to take their word for what “America First” might mean.
For example, isn’t the Golden Dome missile-defense program, for which the U.S. Missile Defense Agency contracted AHTNA Inc., an ANC, part of the America First agenda?
Likewise, aren’t North Slope oil and gas drilling projects run by the Arctic Slope Regional Corp. — an ANC that owns nearly five million acres of energy-rich lands — another part of the America First agenda?
Finally, the Red Dog Mine in northwestern Alaska, which is one of the world’s largest zinc mines, is on the lands of the NANA corporation, an ANC run by the Inupiaq people. The Sealaska corporation in southeastern Alaska is also involved with the Bokan Mountain project, a potential source for many rare-earth elements essential for producing everything from cell phones and electric cars to batteries and wind turbines. Currently, China has a near-monopoly on rare-earth production and refining, which Trump wants to break.
When I reported on ANCs in 1985, I wrote that, despite their early struggles, they were “a remarkable experiment” in using free enterprise to improve Native Americans’ living standards. Like many beneficiaries of SBA assistance and federal contracts, ANCs have contributed to economic growth and advanced many federal priorities.
Regulators and conservative pundits alike would be wise to learn from history that before irreversible harm is done to ANCs, Alaskan Natives and many of our federal priorities, the SBA must restore the 8(a) program.
Andrew L. Yarrow, a former New York Times reporter and author of six books, has written extensively on U.S. politics, public policy and social issues.