Carveouts for Alaska and tax breaks for whalers: How Lisa Murkowski got to yes on Trump's agenda bill

CNN

a day ago

The fate of President Donald Trump's domestic agenda was in Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski's hands – and she used that leverage to force a series of changes that will deliver more federal dollars to her state.
The Senate passed Trump's so-called 'big, beautiful bill' on Tuesday, after a 26-hour marathon of negotiations and amendments during which Murkowski, as she put it later, 'struggled mightily' to soften the biggest funding blows to Alaska before ultimately casting a vote that guaranteed its passage.
The changes she won, including some crucial carveouts for Alaska, were a window into how such a massive piece of legislation comes together in Washington. The closely divided Senate means figures like Murkowski – a moderate with a history of defying Trump, elected by a state with an independent streak – wield enormous power.
'This is probably the most difficult and agonizing legislative 24-hour period that I have encountered,' Murkowski told reporters afterward. 'And I've been here quite a while, and you all know I've got a few battle scars underneath me. But I think I held my head up and made sure that the people of Alaska are not forgotten in this.'
Murkowski's role as the deciding vote on the bill that extends Trump's 2017 tax cuts, funds his immigration crackdown, imposes work requirements on social safety net programs and more, came fully into view in recent days.
Republicans, who control the Senate by a 53-47 margin, believed they'd already lost Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who objected to the bill's debt ceiling increase, and were doubtful about Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who objected to Medicaid spending cuts and is up for reelection next year in a moderate state. Then, over the weekend, North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis announced he would not seek reelection and delivered a fiery speech lambasting the Medicaid cuts and warning Trump he's been 'misinformed' about their impact.
That meant the GOP had no more votes to spare. The bill's only chance at passage was a 50-50 vote, with Vice President JD Vance breaking the tie.
Suddenly, much of the party's focus was on Murkowski. For the next 48 hours, the Alaska senator was the subject of frenzied lobbying by some of Washington's most powerful Republicans, including Vance, Senate Majority Leader John Thune and committee chairmen.
Behind the scenes, staffers were rewriting key pieces of the bill to win her support – making changes on Medicaid, nutritional assistance and even adding a tax break for whaling captains.
South Carolina Sen. Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of Trump's closest Capitol Hill allies, spent hours courting Murkowski's vote, including long huddles on the Senate floor at all hours. That included a tense conversation just ahead of the vote, in which Graham said Murkowski vented her frustrations about the massive scope and complexity of the package but in the end, he said, didn't want it all to fail.
'I just said, in my talk with her, 'Number one, I'm frustrated too,'' Graham recalled of their conversation on the floor. He went on to stress other critical provisions of the bill, including money for the military. Murkowski had praised the added Coast Guard funds.
Graham's main message to her, he said, was this: 'Are you good? If you're not good, tell me why and see if we can fix it.'
Murkowski has long telegraphed her concerns with the bill. In a town hall last month in Cordova – a port town accessible only by plane or ferry – she praised some elements of the bill but warned against federal funding cuts to social safety net programs like Medicaid and food stamps.
Some lawmakers, including Murkowski and Collins, were particularly worried about the blow Medicaid cuts would deliver to rural hospitals – many of which are struggling, with some closing already.
'Many of us are looking at that and saying, it makes no sense to put a greater burden on the most vulnerable in our communities when it comes to health care and access to health care,' Murkowski said at the town hall, The Cordova Times reported. 'I have made clear very early on that we cannot move forward with a bill that makes cuts to Medicaid.'
One obstacle for Republicans courting Murkowski's vote was the Senate parliamentarian, who rules on whether provisions of bills violate the chamber's budget rules.
Shortly before the final vote, Senate leaders were still trying to secure more funding for Alaska's rural hospitals – after already doubling a fund they'd added for rural hospitals, from $25 billion to $50 billion, to be disbursed over five years. Staffers were still writing in the margins of the bill, trying to find a way to make the rural hospital fund more appealing to Murkowski, two sources familiar with the matter said. Collins also lobbied to beef up the rural hospital fund, but it was not enough to win her vote.
It was one of many attempts to shore up more funding for the state's Medicaid recipients or providers that failed to pass muster with the parliamentarian.
At first, Republicans devised a provision that increased Medicaid funding for states based on poverty rates. It was crafted in a way that would have applied only to Alaska and Hawaii. That, the parliamentarian said, violated Senate rules.
Next, Republicans tried to use population density to apply increased Medicaid funding to Alaska and more rural states, including Montana, North and South Dakota and Wyoming, one of the sources said. It was ruled out of order.
Ultimately, there might be some wiggle room to help Alaska, after all. A GOP source familiar with the rural hospital fund said that while some of its funding will be doled out based on a formula, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services also has discretion and flexibility to weight other factors that will allow them to steer where the money goes.
In addition to the fight on Medicaid, Murkowski won a huge victory on a provision that delays the requirement that states with high payment error rates start contributing to the cost of food stamp benefits. The original measure would make states with error rates of 6% or higher pick up between 5% and 15% of the tab. But the states with the largest error rates would get another year or two to implement the provision, said Ty Jones Cox, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Currently, 10 states, including Alaska, have error rates that would qualify for the delay.
Murkowski also won a change in the expansion of the work requirement for food stamps. Alaska, as well as Hawaii, got two other carveouts: One would allow these states to waive all work requirements based on high unemployment rates. For other states, the package limits such waivers. The other carveout would allow either state to request a temporary waiver for residents from the work requirement if the US Agriculture secretary determines the state is making a 'good faith' effort to implement the mandate.
She also secured an increase in a special tax deduction for whaling boat captains.
Murkowski told reporters she 'struggled mightily' with the impacts of cutting Medicaid and food stamp benefits in her state.
'That weighs very, very heavily, and so what I tried to do was to ensure that my colleagues understood what that means when you live in an area where there are no jobs. It is not a cash economy. And so I needed help and I worked to get that every single day,' she said.
Murkowski is a Republican, but one who owes less politically to Trump and the party's establishment than most in her party.
After losing the GOP primary during her reelection bid in 2010, she ran as a write-in candidate – and won the general election. A decade later, Trump had said he'd back anyone with 'a pulse' against Murkowski in her primary. Former Alaska Department of Administration commissioner Kelly Tshibaka ran, with endorsements from Trump and the Alaska Republican Party. But Murkowski won again, earning more first-place votes than Tshibaka in both the primary and general election in Alaska's ranked-choice voting system.
Murkowski has also mused aloud multiple times about the possibility of leaving the GOP to become an independent, including in a podcast interview released last week.
Her hard-nosed negotiating over the bill containing Trump's domestic agenda evoked memories of other carve-outs designed to win over individual lawmakers when congressional leaders had no votes to spare.
In 2010, when Senate Democrats held 60 seats and could spare zero votes to break a filibuster and pass the Affordable Care Act into law, they sought to earn Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson's support with the 'Cornhusker Kickback' – a provision that permanently exempted his state from paying for its share of the law's Medicaid expansion.
Seven years later, as the GOP sought to repeal Obamacare during Trump's first term in the White House, Senate Republicans tucked into their bill what some called the 'Polar Payoff.' It was a subsidy for the individual health insurance marketplaces that was designed only to benefit Alaska. (Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer derisively used the same phrase to describe the latest deal for Murkowski.)
Neither of those earlier carve-outs became law. And it's not yet clear whether the changes Murkowski negotiated will remain in place as Trump's so-called big, beautiful bill returns to the House.
Adding to the uncertainty, the Alaska senator stunned some of her own colleagues in both chambers when she told reporters Tuesday, shortly after the bill's passage, that she hopes the House amends it and returns it to the Senate.
'We do not have a perfect bill, by any stretch of the imagination,' she said. 'My hope is that the House is going to look at this and recognize that we're not there yet. And I would hope that we would be able to actually do what we used to do around here, which is work back and forth between the two bodies to get a measure that's going to be better for the people in this country, and more particularly, for the people in Alaska.'