Alaska’s congressional delegation joined with their Republican colleagues in voting for an 870-page bill that appropriates $170 billion for the president’s border security and immigration agenda and an additional $150 billion for defense programs.

To help pay for the new spending, the legislation cuts hundreds of billions of dollars from federal assistance programs over the next several years.

The legislation also extends tax cuts adopted in 2017 that were set to expire this year.

President Donald Trump signed the legislation on the Fourth of July, with U.S. Air Force B2 bombers flying overhead.

Even with the reductions to spending on Medicaid, food stamps and other services, the bill is expected to increase the national debt by $3.4 trillion over the next 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

The final vote in the Senate was 51-50 on July 1, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tiebreaker. Republicans hold 53 seats in the Senate, but three Republicans joined all of the Senate’s Democrats in voting against the bill, requiring Vance’s tiebreaking act.

Alaska Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan voted for the measure.

Murkowski had been considered a deciding vote in the Senate.

After the vote, the senator said she hoped that the House would vote down the measure, allowing further work.

“We do not have a perfect bill by any stretch of the imagination. My hope is that the House is going to look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet,” Murkowski said.

The House rejected Murkowski’s advice and accepted the Senate version of the bill, 218-214, with only two votes to spare in the closely divided chamber. Three House Republicans voted against the bill; no Democrats supported the measure.

In a later interview, Murkowski said an “accumulation of different initiatives” caused her to vote for it.

She wanted to see the continuation of tax cuts, enacted in 2017 during Trump’s first term. She also cited the extension of the child tax credit, which lowers taxes for families with children.

The bill cuts back federal income taxes on overtime and tips, and provides an additional tax break for some people on Social Security.

“The challenge was — and we saw it on the House side and we saw it here in the Senate — the challenge was, where do you pay for those?” Murkowski said.

For the president and members of Congress, Medicaid cuts were a partial answer.

Roughly one in three Alaskans receive health care coverage through Medicaid, a federal-state program for people with low incomes, as well as the primary payer for most nursing home residents. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank opposed to the bill, estimated that 35,000 Alaskans will lose health insurance under the bill, both from Medicaid and from scaling back federal tax credits for individual health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

Statewide, more than 260,000 Alaskans were covered by Medicaid in May; close to 40,000 were children.

As of May, almost 700 individuals in Wrangell were on Medicaid, according to the Alaska Division of Public Assistance. That is more than one-third of the entire community.

That is down from 818 Medicaid recipients in May 2023.

The decline could be attributed to people earning too much and losing eligibility for the programs, or because the state in 2023 resumed annual eligibility verifications that had been suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Murkowski and Sullivan had sought more than $6 billion in Alaska-specific Medicaid funding to offset the bill’s consequences in the state, but those provisions were rejected by the Senate parliamentarian as violations of the longstanding rule that limits what can be included in legislation crafted to avoid Senate filibuster rules.

In the end, Alaska will share with other states a new $50 billion rural hospital fund. Murkowski and Sullivan said that and other funding in the bill would result in $200 million to $300 million per year to the state, partially offsetting the cuts in the bill.

That money could prevent five Alaska hospitals — in Valdez, Seward, Kodiak, Cordova and Ketchikan — from closing because of the cuts within the bill. The five were among 338 nationwide considered to be at risk under provisions in the bill, according to an analysis by health services researchers at the University of North Carolina.

Adult Alaskans who receive Medicaid will be required to work, volunteer or undergo job training for at least 20 hours per week unless they are sick, have children or care for older people.

The bill also imposes work requirements for SNAP, also known as food stamps, and requires states to partially fund the program.

Alaska will be exempted from that state cost-share for two years, Murkowski said, and if the state continues to reduce the number of applications flagged for errors — the highest error rate in the country — that pause could be extended.

“I worked my butt off to make sure that Alaskans were not going to be penalized and were not going to be harmed,” she said.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that without the pause, Alaska would have to pay $37 million per year to keep food aid steady for needy households.

Almost 80 Wrangell households received SNAP benefits in May 2025, down from 122 in May 2023.

The federal government already mandates that “able-bodied adults” work in order to receive food aid, and the new bill extends that requirement to people as old as 64, up from the current age-54 limit.

Parents with children under 14 are exempt, as are pregnant people, Alaska Natives and people “medically certified as physically or mentally unfit for employment.”

The Alaska Beacon is an independent, donor-funded news organization. Alaskabeacon.com.