When people find out we live in Alaska, the first question they almost always ask is, "What are the winters like?" We answer honestly: "Long, cold, and dark; lots of snow." As you might imagine, those long, cold, and dark winters with lots of snow are hard on our roads. Alaskans sometimes describe our state as having two seasons: Winter and roadwork. In spring and summer, it's not only the road surface that needs to be repaired, but often guard rails, and usually a whole bunch of road signs have to be replaced. 

Because of the screwball way federal highway funds are handled - namely, collected, sent to Washington, rinsed through several layers of useless bureaucracy, and then a portion divvied back to the states - each state is required to submit a plan for road construction before the mighty federal Department of Transportation (DOT) will release said funding.

This year, something happened that has never happened before: The DOT rejected Alaska's road construction plan.

The Biden Administration rejected Alaska’s plan for road construction for the coming years and sent it back to the Department of Transportation, in what appears to be an attempt to hit at Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Alaska itself during an election year in which Biden already has a slim chance of winning the 49th state.

The Alaska State Transportation Improvement Program (STIP) is the plan for how the state will use federal dollars between 2024 and 2027. The plan is the next generation of the 2020-2023 STIP, a document that is worked on for years and is worth at least $900 million in federal dollars each year. The current STIP ends March 31. 

Every state submits a STIP document to the Federal Highway Administration that covers a period of work stretching four years. Alaska has never seen one rejected.

When it comes to presidential politics, Alaska (despite the ranked-choice victory by Democrat Mary Peltola in 2022 over Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich III) is a pretty reliably red state; the last time Alaska's three Electoral College votes went to a Democrat was when Lyndon Johnson took the Great Land's vote in 1964. Could that have anything to do with the rejection? A few years ago, such pettiness on the part of Washington would have been hard to imagine, but these days, with the least competent administration in history? Suddenly, the imagination becomes a lot more fluid.

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Indeed, there are indications that, yes, the Biden Administration - or, at least, some of its functionaries - may indeed be that petty.

Sources say that that the Federal Highway Administration, under the Biden Administration, has a few midlevel activists who decided to throw a monkey wrench into Alaska’s STIP, forcing the state to redo some of its work. However, while they were empowered to reject projects that Alaska wants, such as roads, bridges, or ferry terminals, the federal agency made a number of mistakes during its rejection, so much so that the Biden Administration is now in panic mode, sending two people north to Alaska to straighten out the mess these activist federal employees made.

Oops.

The answer to this, whether this problem is incompetence or malice, is to get rid of their stupid extra layer of bureaucracy. Let the states manage their own highway funds, collect their own revenues (usually fuel taxes), and maintain their roads. Cut out the wasteful federal middleman. These things, like most things, are best handled at the state level, and while one might make an argument for federal support for the interstate system, that doesn't apply in the case of Alaska.

And if some minor functionaries in the federal DOT were responsible for this Charlie Foxtrot, they should be the first ones fired.