Dozens of attendees at the Alaska Federation of Natives convention stood to protest U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan’s speech Friday morning.
Throughout Sullivan’s 35-minute address, people stood with their backs to the stage. Some held signs defending Medicaid. Sullivan supported a bill that cuts $1 trillion from the health care program over a decade. Others held signs supporting public radio, which Sullivan voted to defund.
As a theme of his speech, Sullivan touted multiple provisions in the federal budget reconciliation bill that he said would be a boon for Alaska.
“What I like to call the Alaska Opportunity Act, because there are so many things in this bill that we have been trying to get done as a state for our Native communities,” Sullivan said.
The bill imposes volunteer and work requirements for Medicaid, but he emphasized that Alaska Native people are exempt from those requirements. He didn’t clarify what steps recipients would have to take to prove they qualify for those exemptions.
“There's obviously ways you gotta verify it,” Sullivan said as he entered an elevator outside the convention hall after the speech. “You can't — you know, you got to apply and be verified. I don't have the details, but we're getting the funding, and it's in the law, and that's important.”
Sullivan told convention attendees that he and his team "worked night and day to make sure our rural radios continued to get the funding they need to stay on the air.”
He did not tell them that, in July, he was one of 51 senators who voted to claw back all federal funding for public broadcasting stations across the country. At the elevator, he defended that vote on ideological grounds.
“I've been saying for years that NPR, Corporation for Public Broadcasting was at risk with funding because it was biased reporting,” Sullivan said. “And you and I might disagree, but I think it was very biased left-wing reporting across the country.”
More than a dozen rural Alaska public radio stations that lost federal money were recently granted one-time funding from the Department of Interior, which Sullivan took credit for.
Several of Sullivan’s remarks drew applause from the audience, including his efforts to combat sexual assault in Indigenous communities, and his work advocating for Alaska Native walrus ivory carvers to be excluded from laws aimed at ending trade in elephant ivory.
The AFN convention runs through Saturday afternoon in Anchorage.
