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Alaska’s 8(a) Economy – What’s At Stake
A federal contracting program most Alaskans have never heard of moves a massive amount of money into Alaska’s economy. Four speakers explained why its future is suddenly uncertain.
ANCHORAGE (05/21/26) — Forum Summary by Ross Johnston, Executive Director, Commonwealth North
$13.5 billion.
That is the combined 2022 revenue of Alaska’s twelve Native regional corporations, according to Katie Berry, who leads McKinley Research Group. For scale: Alaska’s entire 2025 seafood harvest came in around $1.6 billion. North Slope oil, in a good year, sells for upward of $10 billion. By that measure the regional corporations sit in rare company, one of the largest economic forces in the state.
Most of that money is earned somewhere else. About two-thirds of it comes from operations outside Alaska, then flows back home. And when it lands, it lands wide.
$300 to $350 million a year, distributed through dividends, elder benefits, and scholarships.
Berry offered one way to anchor that figure. Only one other program in Alaska reaches into 200-some communities with that kind of consistency. The Permanent Fund Dividend.
The reach does not stop at distributions. About 110,000 Alaska Native regional shareholders live in the state, roughly 15 percent of the population. And in a fiscal detail that tends to vanish in Juneau’s revenue debates, Alaska Native corporations are required by the structure of ANCSA to organize as C corporations. That makes them the one category of Alaska business obligated to pay state corporate income tax. Berry, watching the fiscal debates in Juneau, argued the point deserves to be elevated. In a state with no broad-based personal tax, that is not a small thing to leave out of the conversation.
Behind much of this sits a federal contracting tool most Alaskans have never heard of, and one now under renewed scrutiny in Washington. That was the subject of Commonwealth North’s May 21 forum at the Petroleum Club of Anchorage. The SBA’s 8(a) program lets federal agencies award work to socially and economically disadvantaged businesses, including Alaska Native corporations. Four speakers had gathered to explain what it does, how the money flows, and what stands to change.
This summary is a recap of the information presented. It is not an official record, transcript, or position statement. The content reflects only the views and statements made by the individual presenters and participants at the time of the forum. It should not be interpreted as representing the official views, opinions, policies, or positions of Commonwealth North, its leadership, board members, staff, or affiliates.
Forum Recording – YouTube
How We Got Here
To understand why a contracting program matters this much to Alaska, you have to start more than a century before the program existed.
Emil Notti walked the room through it, and few people alive are better positioned to. Notti wrote the 1966 letter that called the first statewide meeting leading to the Alaska Federation of Natives. He helped negotiate the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act itself.
Nicole Borromeo, president of the ANCSA Regional Association, filled in the legal arc. When the United States bought Alaska in the 1867 Treaty of Cession, the territory sat in a kind of limbo for roughly a century, too big and too far away for the federal government to know what to do with. Congress had also, in 1871, ended the practice of settling Native land claims by treaty. So when the question finally came due, it came due through legislation rather than the treaty process that had governed land claims elsewhere.
That legislation was ANCSA, in 1971. Native people gave up claim to hundreds of millions of acres in exchange for 45 million acres and a cash settlement. The land, Borromeo emphasized, was always meant to be the engine of self-determination. The corporations would use it, develop it, and support their people.
Then came a complication. The 1980 federal lands act overlaid parks and preserves across much of the state, including ANCSA lands. Development on those lands, Borromeo noted dryly, turned out to be harder than promised.
The 8(a) pathway arrived in 1986, when Congress amended the Small Business Act to let Native corporations and tribes participate in federal contracting. Notti placed it in the longer history of the program, created by Congress decades earlier to help disadvantaged individuals, later broadened to disadvantaged communities. That broadening is what brought ANCs in. Borromeo was quick to add that Native corporations are not uniquely privileged here. The same federal contracting world includes set-asides for veterans, for women-owned businesses, and for others.
Borromeo made the historical point land with one observation about her work in Washington. The thing that consistently stops members of Congress short, she said, is the reminder that they wrote this law. They imposed the corporate structure. They settled the land claims this way.
What 8(a) Actually Is
Strip away the assumptions, and 8(a) is not what its critics in Washington often take it to be.
Notti was the bluntest on this point.
It is not DEI. It does not create individual wealth. It is not corporate enrichment. It distributes earnings broadly.
He argued the program runs without guaranteed contracts and without preferential pricing, that ANCs are among the most audited federal contractors, and that its purpose is building sustainable businesses where unemployment is high and private capital is thin. He recalled a time when Alaska’s banks lacked the capital to finance projects, and 8(a) profits, drawn from operations around the world, brought outside money home.
Borromeo offered the working metaphor of the afternoon. Calling on an 8(a) contractor, she said, is akin to calling on special forces. Agencies use the program because it is fast and because they are working with known, vetted partners. She put the time savings at roughly 75 percent, with some awards landing in 30 to 60 days against the year or more a full procurement can take.
Speed is not the same as cutting corners, she emphasized. The contractors arrive with full books and records, and a contracting officer reviews everything before an award. Awards go to performance, not preference: rigorous cost schedules, audits, CPAR ratings, measured delivery. She added a detail from her own seat as a village corporation chair. The federal government will hold a contractor to delivery even when the work runs at a loss.
Where the Money Comes From, and Where It Goes
Berry had a pet peeve, and it turned out to be a useful one. The phrase “economic driver” gets attached to almost any industry, she noted, but it has a specific meaning. A driver brings new money into an economy from outside, rather than recirculating money already here. By that test, Alaska’s traditional economy runs on selling raw or near-raw resources to the world. Oil. Seafood. Zinc. ANC regional corporations, she argued, work differently. Much of their revenue comes from operations outside Alaska, then returns to the state as profit. That is the distinction behind the $13.5 billion: of that total, only about $4.5 billion traces to Alaska-based operations. The other $9 billion was earned elsewhere and carried home.
Two figures from the same McKinley work, commissioned by the ANCSA Regional Association, fill in the picture:
- Employment: 50,000+ worldwide, about 8,000 to 9,000 in Alaska. Berry noted the in-state figure is close to the number of people working in Alaska oil extraction with support services.
- Shareholders: roughly 150,000, about 110,000 of them in Alaska. The rest are domiciled outside the state and around the world.
And here is the gap at the center of the afternoon. Nobody has quantified how much of that $13.5 billion runs through 8(a) contracts. There is no single number. Berry was direct about it, calling the question low-hanging fruit for future research. “We enter the land of rumor and conjecture in Alaska a lot,” she said, and 8(a)’s exact weight is one of those places, somewhere between “they’re not that important” and “it’s everything,” with no firm figure to settle it.
The uncertainty runs in both directions at once. Notti put 8(a) at roughly 4 percent of all federal contracting, a figure that tracks with recent federal data showing about $35 billion in 8(a) awards against a federal contracting total well north of $800 billion. But that $35 billion is the entire national pool, the work every 8(a) firm in the country competes for, individual, tribal, and ANC alike. How much of it Alaska Native corporations actually capture is its own open question. A program that looks marginal from Washington can still be load-bearing for a single state, and the numbers exist to confirm neither claim.
Carlton supplied the detail that keeps the gap from being mistaken for the whole story. Many corporations are not betting everything on the program. Chugach learned that lesson in a roughly 2008 contracting fight, when government work made up close to 90 percent of its revenue. The company spent the years since deliberately diversifying, building lines of business that do not lean on 8(a) at all. It has not seen a revenue dip yet. The worry, Carlton said, is the years ahead. The exposure is uneven across the 12 regional corporations, which means any change to the program would not land evenly either. The most dependent firms would feel it first and hardest.
Berry was equally candid about a second limit. The McKinley numbers cover regional corporations only, not the village corporations that rank among the largest companies in the state. Every figure, she said, should carry an implied plus sign.
What that money does once it gets home was Katherine Carlton’s territory. Carlton, president of Chugach Alaska Corporation and policy chair of the Native American Contractors Association, took the program out of the abstract with a single story.
Tonia Burrough is a Chugach shareholder. As a teenager, she counted on her annual dividend to buy school clothes. Later, after years away from the workforce raising two sons, she returned through a Chugach internship, earned a bachelor’s degree, completed a graduate certificate, and now works as a senior security specialist. Her sons went to college on Chugach scholarships. One graduated this year. Chugach interviewed him for an internship the same week as the forum.
When a contract performs, Carlton argued, the value does not leave the community. It recirculates through education, careers, and dividends. She called it a multiplier effect.
The corporate scale behind that one story: Chugach runs roughly 5,000 employees across 110 locations, 28 states, and 10 countries, and returned $66.8 million to shareholders and communities in 2025. Carlton tied the company’s path into contracting directly to crisis. After the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill devastated businesses in Chugach’s region, the company moved into government work, and 8(a) helped it get a foothold. That foothold now reaches NAS Fallon, home of the Navy’s Top Gun program, Fort Greeley’s ballistic missile defense site, and Navy and Coast Guard command-and-control systems. Not entry-level work, and the agencies that depend on it have a stake in the program’s stability too.
The Real Concern Is Not a Policy Change
Carlton spent much of her time on a distinction she thinks is getting lost in Washington. The risk, she argued, is not a formal change on paper. It is erosion of confidence before any change arrives, agencies growing hesitant to use a lawful tool because the climate around it has turned suspicious.
She drew a careful line between oversight and suspicion. Native-owned 8(a) firms already operate under SBA eligibility rules, annual and financial reporting, subcontracting limits, and community-benefit reporting, evaluated continuously through CPAR ratings and safety performance. Chugach, ARA, and NACA support that oversight, she said. The concern is when oversight tips into a presumption of guilt.
The near-term evidence Carlton offered was concrete. SBA has stalled the applications that let ANCs renew entities and bring new ones into the 8(a) space. That freeze does not hurt this year. It hurts in the years that follow, slowly narrowing the pipeline of firms able to compete. She named two pressures driving the scrutiny: an early framing of the program as riddled with fraud, waste, and abuse, and the current administration’s move away from anything labeled diversity, equity, and inclusion. The panel pushed back on both. On the first, Borromeo argued the program simply does not carry the levels of fraud and abuse found elsewhere in federal contracting, because the barrier to entry is high and the awards are constantly audited; Notti called ANCs among the most scrutinized contractors in the system, recertified again and again on the strength of their performance. On the second, both argued the DEI label misreads the structure entirely. ANCs participate as entities representing communities, not as individuals claiming a demographic category.
Where the Panel Disagreed With Itself
The closest thing to friction came in the Q&A, and it is worth surfacing because it cut against the room’s grain.
Ross Johnston posed a doom-and-gloom hypothetical. If 8(a) went away, where would the work go? Borromeo’s answer was that the contracts would not vanish, the federal government still needs the goods and services, but the work would consolidate among the largest private firms rather than reaching small businesses.
Berry pushed back on the premise itself. She said she heard in the question an assumption that ANCs are not competitive without the program, and she rejected it, in her words, in a really stringent way. Many corporations have decades of qualifications and proven delivery behind them. Losing 8(a), in her view, would not collapse their competitiveness. It would intensify the competition and disadvantage the smaller corporations specifically.
The two positions are not flatly contradictory. Both expect consolidation toward larger firms. But they place the established ANCs differently on that field, and the panel did not resolve which view is right. The reader can hold both.
Berry flagged one more question worth watching: the coming closure of Red Dog Mine and what it does to the revenue-sharing streams that many village corporations depend on. A topic for another forum, but a consequential one.
What Comes Next
Notti, asked to close with advice for the next 50 years of corporate leadership, kept it short. The corporations, he said, have to pay more attention to their shareholders.
It was a fitting last word from the man who wrote the first letter. The afternoon had spent two hours on revenue, federal procurement, and missile defense infrastructure. Notti brought it back to the people the money is supposed to reach. Tonia Burrough’s school clothes. A son interviewed for an internship the same week his mother sat in a forum about why the program might not survive.
The decisions are being made 4,000 miles away. The clothes were bought in Alaska.
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