Inside the Hunger Crisis in America’s Last Frontier

By the time fruits and vegetables finally make it to the more rural villages in the region Kawerak serves, Lizak said, they are often halfway to their expiration date, or even already rotting. “And that’s if you can afford it,” Lizak continued. “Which you can’t.”

When the Senate passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in early July, the deciding vote came from Murkowski, who—despite her open skepticism of the legislation—was swayed in its favor by a number of provisions intended to limit the impact on her state, including multiple exemptions and delays in implementation. When justifying her vote, Murkowski said in an interview with NBC News that she “tried to take care of Alaska’s interests.” She also made an unusual, and honest, acknowledgment: “I know that in many parts of the country, there are Americans that are not going to be advantaged by this bill.”

Reading through the bill makes clear how deliberate Murkowski was in negotiating exemptions to the social safety net in ways that would most benefit her state. Although the legislation significantly limited certain funding streams by which most states are able to get federal reimbursement for their Medicaid costs, Alaska is the only state not reliant on those methods. Murkowski and other skeptical Republican lawmakers secured a $50 billion fund intended to shore up rural hospitals that might otherwise be affected by cuts to Medicaid, but opponents argue that it’s unclear whether this money will adequately cover potential losses.

Another provision would allow areas of Alaska to obtain exemptions to the work requirements for SNAP if their unemployment rate is greater than 150 percent of the national rate. Medicaid recipients could also be exempt from work requirements if they live in an area with high unemployment.

Perhaps most notable are the several specific exemptions made for Indigenous Americans, including Alaska Natives, who disproportionately struggle with poverty and food insecurity and would be deeply affected by cuts to benefits. Alaska Natives have also been a particularly important constituency for Murkowski throughout her political career. Alaska Natives are automatically excluded from new, more stringent work requirements for SNAP and Medicaid for able-bodied adults without dependents. They are also exempt from a provision that requires states that have expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act to redetermine eligibility for recipients every six months.

Alaska Natives and American Indians already are excluded from Medicaid cost-sharing under federal law, so such a provision included in the new law will not apply to them. But a non–Native Alaskan who earns between 100 and 138 percent of the federal poverty level would be subject to new cost-sharing requirements. So, for example, a white Alaskan fitting those requirements living in Nome could pay up to $35 for an appointment to get an X-ray, while an Alaska Native also living in Nome would not.

Some opponents of the law believe it may be difficult to determine who is an Alaska Native, given that there are many people in the state who may have both tribal and non-tribal ancestors. The legacy of racism against Alaska Natives in the state is another sore spot that the law might agitate. Amanda Snyder, the pastor at Our Savior’s Lutheran Church in Nome, worries that such provisions could exacerbate discrimination in her community, which has both significant Alaska Native and white populations.

“If we have this bill coming through that gives more Native preference in a community that’s mixed, I could see that causing more anger and bitterness toward people who label Native people as drunks, or Native people as less than or as uneducated,” said Snyder, who is white. “So will that actually increase tensions when suddenly people lose their benefits based on the color of their skin, and seeing it as the fault of others, and not the fault of D.C. or Lisa Murkowski?”

Despite Murkowski’s efforts, some believe the law will still wreak significant damage on an already-weakened state social safety net. From the perspective of Democratic state Representative Genevieve Mina, whose Anchorage district has the highest percentage of SNAP participants in the state, “Everybody has been thrown into the ocean, but we’ve been given a life jacket—but it’s a life jacket that has holes in it.”

For example, exemptions to work requirements are applicable to the majority of the state in terms of land mass, but not in terms of population. They will not cover more urban and wealthier parts of the state, such as the Anchorage area, much of southern Alaska, Fairbanks, and the North Slope. An Alaskan in the Bethel Census Area would be exempt from SNAP and Medicaid work requirements because they live in a region with a high unemployment rate, while a non–Native Alaskan living in the Anchorage area would not be excepted from that provision. (The Bethel region has recently been rocked by typhoon-induced flooding that has devastated the infrastructure in outlying coastal villages.)

“If you’re cutting me with a slightly less long knife, is it better? Like, no, I would prefer not to be cut,” said Jenny-Marie Stryker, executive director of the Alaska Democratic Party. “The carve-outs are good. If you’re going to do a bad thing, we’re happy to be hurt less. But I don’t think that’s going to win voters.”

Alaska’s dramatically high SNAP error rate—the percentage of underpayments and overpayments in benefits in the state in a given year—comes into play elsewhere in the law. States will soon begin paying for a portion of SNAP benefits, which were previously fully covered by the federal government, depending on their error rates. With its hefty SNAP backlog, Alaska will benefit from a provision granting a delay for an additional one to two years to give a state with a high error rate additional time to lower it before it has to start paying its share. Although that provision will apply to a few states other than Alaska, it was inserted with the primary motive of earning Murkowski’s vote.

Alaska had the highest error rate of any state in the country in fiscal year 2024, at nearly 25 percent. Even if the state manages to get its error rate down to 10 percent by the fall of 2027, Alaska would still be shouldering 15 percent of the cost of SNAP benefits starting in fall of 2029, when the fiscal year begins. If the state is unable to fully cover that cost, it might reduce benefit amounts, introducing sticker shock for low-income Alaskans already struggling with high food prices.

States will also need to start shouldering 75 percent of the cost of administering SNAP beginning in late 2026, which could place a further burden on Alaska’s already-strained system. Mina noted that many of the state’s services had already been “cut to the bone,” which could make it difficult to find funding for SNAP. “All of this comes to the political will of our legislature and also our state administration and our governor to figure out, like, ‘What’s a better way to fund the things that really matter to help people live and thrive in the state?’” said Mina. “We’re going to have to just plan for a reality that we’re going to have some sort of an error rate.”

Because portions of the law will be rolled out piecemeal over several years, state Senator Löki Tobin, a Democrat who represents a disproportionately low-income area of Anchorage, said that the uncertainty around implementation of the law was a major concern. When the state is putting these provisions into effect, Tobin wondered, who will be at the table if executing them proves more difficult than expected? “The consequences for particularly folks in rural communities, whether they are Alaska Native or not, are going to be really severe if we don’t have a better understanding of what the implementation process will look like,” said Tobin.

The headquarters of the Food Bank of Alaska resembles nothing so much as a gigantic Costco warehouse, an industrial cavern spanning 80,000 square feet on the edge of Anchorage. A recently completed neighboring building, also in use by the organization, encompasses 30,000 square feet. Fluorescent bulbs cast harsh light on the rows and rows of towering shelves, stacked with boxes of prepacked food. In 2024, the food bank distributed nearly eight million pounds of food through partners across the state—such as pantries and community organizations—providing roughly 6.7 million meals.

It was after hours when Rachael Miller, the chief advocacy officer of the Food Bank of Alaska, conducted a tour of the facility, uninterrupted by the bustle of workers or the beeping of forklifts moving pallets. Miller pointed out a station where earlier that summer, players from the Seattle Seahawks—for Alaskans, the “local” NFL team—had tired themselves out packing boxes for distribution. Elsewhere, pallets of boxes awaited delivery to a church in Wrangell, a town in the southeast of the state.

The food bank prints its postage in-house, shipping directly to communities in need; Alaska has a unique program established by the U.S. Postal Service more than 50 years ago known as Bypass Mail, which allows private carriers to bypass USPS facilities when mailing large quantities of food across the state. But even with the capacity to directly mail to struggling communities, there are what Miller calls “Alaska challenges.” The majority of food is not sourced in-state. Products not only need to be shipped to Alaska; they then must make their way across a state that is larger than Texas, California, and Montana combined, but that has only around 14,000 miles of public road, about the same as Vermont.

The hurdles to obtaining food become ever more challenging for the poorest Alaskans. Fifty-five percent of Alaskans who receive multiple social benefits participate in both programs. Miller and others in the anti-hunger space in Alaska are worried about the long-term consequences of imposing new work requirements on SNAP and Medicaid recipients, even if there are exceptions carved out for certain populations and regions in the state.

“I think the potential harm in reducing access to food and medical care was severely underplayed by folks speaking publicly about it,” said Miller. “Why would we not want to give everybody access to enough calories to fill out a job application? If we’re going to increase work requirements, that’s extra hard to do when you’re super hungry.”

The Food Bank of Alaska is a major source for communities with high food insecurity across the state, providing a cushion for households that may be eligible for SNAP but are not receiving benefits. As of September, Alaska had a SNAP backlog of more than 3,000 applicants, a significant improvement from the high of more than 15,000 in 2023, but daunting nonetheless in a low-population state.

This crisis was years in the making. In 2010, during the administration of former Governor Sean Parnell, the state shifted to an assembly line–style system for processing applications for social benefits, where unrelated teams would address different elements of an application. Fred Rapp, a SNAP eligibility technician who has worked in the state Division of Public Assistance for 18 years, believes that this change marked the onset of the problem. DPA workers who would otherwise be conducting interviews were instructed to assist with processing pending applications, which only worsened the workload. Then, in 2021, Governor Mike Dunleavy cut more than 100 jobs from the Division of Public Assistance, leaving the agency—which administers benefits programs such as SNAP and Medicaid—understaffed. When the pandemic hit, Congress approved a number of new emergency policies that made it easier to obtain and maintain benefits. But when those programs expired, more people were suddenly applying anew.

In an effort to address the crisis, the DPA authorized an extension of benefits to needy Alaskans while it worked through the backlog, deliberately bypassing elements of the verification process. As a result, Alaska had the highest percentage of SNAP overpayments in the country in 2023, with the error rate hovering above 60 percent. This rate was cut to 25 percent in 2024, but Alaska has limited time to make improvements before it is affected by the cost-sharing provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Many Alaskans will wait months for their applications to be processed, leaving them without necessary benefits for several months. Rapp recalled a recent client he assisted, a woman in her seventies, who had been waiting for her Medicaid benefits since July 2024. When the agency finally is able to provide the benefits, it will apply them retroactively, covering the costs of the missed months—but by that time, Rapp said, “the damage is already done.” People have been using funds intended for car payments, or rent, or utilities, or other such necessities to pay for food or health care instead.

“Stuff falls behind so that they can buy food while they’re waiting for us to get their benefits,” explained Rapp. “So now when they finally get their benefits and they get a huge lump sum—I mean, yeah, it does make them happy at that point, but it doesn’t relieve the suffering and problems that they had to deal with for the last six or eight months waiting for us to work their case.”

Jasmin Smith, an Anchorage-based community organizer and business owner with 10-year-old twins, has applied for SNAP but been unable to access benefits because of difficulties in scheduling an eligibility interview over the phone. Even more urgently, she briefly lost her Medicaid benefits, despite receiving an insurance card in the mail.

Smith and one of her children have asthma, and the significant cost of inhalers and other medication, which would normally be covered by Medicaid, suddenly needed to be paid out of pocket. When I spoke to her in late August, she said that her benefits appeared to be cut off because of administrative errors by the DPA—not because of any issue with her application. She described the frustration of trying to connect with the agency to obtain her benefits.

“You’re calling, calling, calling every day, and every day the virtual agent’s like, ‘Oh, you’ve got to call at 7:50, at 7:50 you’re going to get the emergency Medicaid line.’ And you call that line every day, and then every day they tell you, ‘I’m so sorry. We’re maxed out. We can’t take any other people.’ And so in the meantime, you’re just kind of sitting there, like—you’re still getting bills,” said Smith. “I’m supposed to have insurance right now, and y’all literally just cut it off because of the issue on your end.”

Smith is unafraid to advocate for herself. When I met her, she was wearing dangling earrings in the shape of pink folding chairs, a reference to the famous quote attributed to the first Black woman to run for president, Representative Shirley Chisholm: “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” But Smith pointed out that many low-income people may struggle with a language barrier, or a lack of time, or even a lack of knowledge of whom to contact when they don’t receive their benefits. When I followed up with her in September, Smith’s Medicaid benefits had been restored, but she knows that not all applicants are able to see their cases resolved so quickly.

Despite the funds that the state legislature has allocated to improving the technology of the state’s benefits system, Rapp does not expect any improvements. He is further galled by the DPA’s hiring of out-of-state contractors to handle applications, rather than hiring more in-state technicians and paying them an equal amount. “What I would say to the public is, don’t expect any great improvement anytime soon, in my estimation. If you’re going to need help from the government of the state of Alaska’s safety net, you’re going to need to plan ahead,” said Rapp.

If Unalakleet is the hub for nearby villages, Nome is unquestionably the locus of the Seward Peninsula. It has just 3,600 residents, but it is still by far the most populous community in the Nome Census Area, a region that is close in size to West Virginia. It has a large grocery store, a medical center, and several restaurants, including a Subway housed in a building that doubles as a movie theater.

Most famous for being the terminus of the Iditarod, the annual sled dog race, Nome was literally put on the map during the gold rush at the turn of the twentieth century. Much of the architecture is influenced by that era, with wooden facades that would not look out of place in an old-fashioned Wild West tourist town. It is a frequent stop for cruise ships rambling up and down the western coast of Alaska, so out-of-state tourists are not an unfamiliar sight for locals.

But for all of the services that make it the economic center of the Bering Strait region, Nome still lacks the resources of a more metropolitan area like Anchorage. An employee at a local gift shop described to me how she regularly flies three hours round trip to and from Anchorage simply to go to Costco; in terms of distance and time in the air, this is akin to a resident of Columbus, Ohio, traveling to New York City to pick up a supersize pack of Kirkland-brand granola bars. But where a trip between New York and Columbus could cost as little as $80 round trip, travel between Nome and Anchorage is closer to $300.

Those unable to afford extensive travel will often post on local Facebook pages asking if anyone has extra groceries that they would be willing to share with their neighbors. It is common to see coolers filled with food as carry-on luggage on smaller flights; any extra space may be used to hold surplus groceries for those in need.

“People will go on Facebook now and just ask, ‘Please, we don’t have any food. We’ve been out of food for a couple days. The kids are really hungry. Is there anyone that can help?’” said Lizak of Kawerak Inc.

Lizak has also seen an uptick in participation in an emergency assistance program administered by Kawerak to help households that either aren’t eligible or have not yet received their benefits. Kawerak will interact directly with vendors, purchasing items for participating members such as food, cleaning supplies, and gear for subsistence hunting. Although this program has historically been used by individuals, Lizak said that more and more families are participating in the program, which is administered on a month-to-month basis. The number has jumped from 87 participants in 2022, to 236 in 2023, to 345 in 2024, to 268 in January through June of 2025.