Alaska lifts 500-day hiring and regulation freeze, no reason given

State agencies can hire again, send employees out of state again, and write new regulations again. Gov. Mike Dunleavy revoked the freeze that stopped all three, 500 days after imposing it.

The order doing it runs four sentences. It names no changed circumstance and does not mention hiring, travel or regulations at all, revoking only the earlier order "implementing fiscal restraint and operational efficiencies." The governor's newsroom carries no announcement of it; a search there turns up the announcement of the freeze in May 2025 and nothing since.

Oil was the reason given for starting it. Petroleum revenue, which supplied close to 90 percent of the unrestricted general fund in the 1980s, now supplies about 40. The spring 2025 forecast put oil at $68 a barrel, down from nearly $85 two years earlier, and the order noted the state's roughly $4.2 billion in savings accounts could not fund operations for a single year. "With oil prices dropping and our savings accounts unable to carry us through even one year of full state operations," Dunleavy said the day he signed it, the state had no choice.

The freeze covered every executive branch agency and every funding source, with no end date, exempting troopers, corrections officers, the Office of Children's Services and staff at places like the Pioneer Homes and the Alaska Psychiatric Institute.

Oil has since come up. The Revenue Department's spring 2026 forecast put fiscal 2026 at $75.26 a barrel, seven dollars above what the freeze was built on, and raised the general fund outlook by $545 million. The department called the gain a possible "temporary windfall" in a volatile market. North Slope crude has run higher still, averaging $85.95 in August and topping $68 every month since February. The order lifting the freeze does not mention any of it.

One piece of the austerity push continues. A separate order from August 2025 requires agencies to cut regulatory requirements 15 percent by the end of this year and 25 percent by the end of 2027. The lift comes 101 days before that first deadline. The Environmental Conservation Department's plan, filed in January, counts 13,000 discretionary regulations and proposes 40 packages that would cut more than 2,600 of them.