Alaska reported 13.2% drop in federal jobs in 2025; a state-owned magazine now claims it’s 4.5%

Mark Sabbatini
18 hours ago
4 min read

Alaska Economic Trends also claims a loss of 87,000 jobs nationally, while US government and other sources put the total well above 200,000

By Mark Sabbatini

Juneau Independent

The latest issue of a state-owned economic magazine claims Alaska lost 4.5% of its federal jobs in 2025, but an earlier report from the agency publishing the magazine puts the loss at 13.2% during the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term.

The August 2026 issue of Alaska Economic Trends also appears to drastically undercount federal job losses nationwide. It reports 87,000 fewer jobs (2.9%) nationally and 700 fewer in Alaska, while other reports cite between 238,000 and 260,000 nationally (10% to 12%) and 2,000 in Alaska.

An official U.S. government dashboard puts the national decline in federal jobs at 272,283 as of Monday morning.

The difference is because the magazine is averaging the month-by-month impact of employment losses, said Karinne Wiebold, a senior economist with the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development who wrote the article, in an interview with the Juneau Independent on Monday.

She said most of the decline in federal jobs occurred during the final three months of the year, so the workforce and economic impacts were far less than if Alaska had 2,000 fewer federal workers during all of 2025.

"I don't think it's misleading," she said. "All we're trying to do is talk about what the impact over the course of a year looks like, not a single month or at the end of the period."

Wiebold’s article is headlined "Alaska lost 4.5% of its federal jobs," with a subhed declaring "Reductions were widespread across departments in 2025."

"In the first quarter of 2025, federal employment was up slightly from the first quarter of the previous year," the article states. "Second quarter jobs were down by 454, and third quarter by 762. Losses more than doubled in the fourth quarter, with federal employment down by 1,607 from the last quarter of 2024."

A state labor department report published earlier this year citing employment figures for January 2026 notes there were 13,100 federal jobs compared to 15,100 in January 2025, a drop of 13.2%.

Reports about federal employment declines nationwide vary somewhat, but are generally described using year-end figures.

A Pew Research Center analysis cites a 10.3% drop, reporting 348,219 people quit, retired, were laid off or otherwise left federal employment, while 116,912 people joined, for a total decline of nearly 238,000 workers. The New York Times, citing the U.S. government’s dashboard, reports a 2025 decline of about 260,000 federal jobs, or more than 12%.

Common to all of the reports is the numbers have fluctuated widely, due to factors such as announced mass layoffs that were later reversed by court challenges or subsequent Trump administration actions.

"The effects of the announced cuts were difficult to track," Wiebold’s article notes. "Thousands of employees remained on the payroll for months after resigning, an unusual benefit meant to encourage more federal workers to leave. Over that time, some were rehired and some who were fired were reinstated through court order. Other complicating factors included the federal hiring freeze, early and regular retirements, and a long federal shutdown."

The article also states Alaska had the third-highest loss of federal jobs among states by percentage, using month-to-month tracking. While other reports citing higher total federal job losses do not provide figures by state, the Economic Policy Institute notes Alaska as of March 2025 ranked sixth among states in federal employees as a percentage of the total workforce.

Among the agencies most affected — in total jobs, not percentage — as job losses accumulated toward the end of the year were the Department of Defense, U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to the Alaska Econmomic Trends article. The biggest agency loss by percentage during the year was the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, dropping to one employee compared to 35 the previous year, a 98% decline.

The biggest percentage declines in federal employment by region were the North Slope and Petersburg.

The Pew study states USAID with 92.4% of jobs lost and the U.S. Department of Education at 42.6% were the biggest reductions nationally. Employment at NOAA and the U.S. Geological Survey dropped about 20%, according to the American Institute of Physics.

Alaska Economic Trends’ reporting was previously questioned when staff for Gov. Mike Dunleavy suppressed the publication of an article in the October 2023 issue examining the competitiveness of teacher pay in Alaska. The deleted article stated Alaska’s teachers are paid more than the national average but “pay premium” has declined significantly since the 1980s.

After strong criticism of the removal by the department’s research chief and four former department commissioners, the article was published with a different headline and a few minor changes in the December issue.

Wiebold said the current article about federal employment isn’t seeking any kind of political spin in how the data is presented.

"This is an attempt at doing what we always do, which is as soon as we have a full year of data we look at a full year of data," she said. "In Alaska, it matters a lot that some of these people were working in the beginning of the year. It matters a lot that some of these people who were not working in December were paid through September. They had wages that they were earning here."

"So that all has an impact on our economy and is reasons why we look at this annualized. And because the fourth quarter was such an important period of change we focused on that very particularly so we can see where things are going. But I completely disagree with the idea that this is in any way trying to sweep it under the rug, make it any less obvious. This is just a very standard way that we look at data."

• Contact Mark Sabbatini at editor@juneauindependent.com or (907) 957-2306.