Last December, when the rats leaving the sinking Biden Ship of State were doling out billions in clandestine grants, Russian TV host Vladimir Solovyov, a close ally of President Putin, thought, “Why not ask Biden to give back Alaska. He isn’t using it much, anyway.”
Okay, maybe that’s a tad of a stretch, but Newsweek took the comment seriously enough to ask “why it matters.” Journalist Natalie Venegas noted that, thanks to “Seward’s Folly,” the U.S. bought Alaska from Tsarist Russia in 1867. But in January 2024, reports surfaced that Putin was investigating options for reobtaining what has long since been the 49th U.S. state.
For decades, naysayers mocked Secretary of State William Seward for buying the mammoth territory at 2 cents an acre ($7.2 million, or $158 million in 2025 dollars). Yet, it turned out to be just as good a deal as Thomas Jefferson made buying Louisiana in 1803 for $15 million – or just $340 million today – about the same value as Mar-a-Lago.
While President Trump views Alaska as harboring literal gold mines – and other valuable minerals, including its abundant North Slope oil and gas reserves – Callie Patteson of the Washington Examiner last week shed light on “how Alaska became central to Trump’s international trade policy.”
In 1960, country singer Johnny Horton sang the title song for the movie “North to Alaska,” which told a tall tale about the days “when the rush was on.” Today, there is a new rush to Alaska, thanks to Trump initiatives, including using tariffs as a springboard to return the U.S. mining and manufacturing industries to their former glory.
While Russians had mined gold in Alaska since the 1830s, Americans only began to search for gold in “them thar hills” in 1896. After that, no one mocked Seward anymore. But gold was by no means Alaska’s only mineral wealth. By the early 1900s, copper and cassiterite (tin) were also being taken out of the chilly ground. There was also an abundance of Alaskan coal.
In the late 20th century, the peaking environmental movement turned mining into a pariah, and regulations were crafted with the not-so-secret intent of preventing any despoiling of pristine (and even not-so-pristine) Alaskan soil. It was, to many, “sacred land.”
Among the many “victories” for anti-development forces during the Biden Administration were the EPA’s 2023 action to deny permits for the Pebble gold and copper mine and Biden’s 2024 executive order banning energy development for more than half of the 23 million acres on Alaska’s North Slope.
But on his first day in office, President Trump issued his own executive order, dubbed “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential.” He proclaimed that unlocking the state’s abundant and largely untapped supply of natural resources “will raise the prosperity of our citizens while helping to enhance our nation’s economic and national security for generations.”
Trump further explained that extracting Alaska’s riches could help deliver price relief for Americans, create high-quality jobs for citizens, ameliorate trade imbalances, push America toward global energy dominance, and guard against foreign powers weaponizing energy supplies in theaters of geopolitical conflict. But, he added, unleashing this opportunity requires reversing punitive restrictions implemented by the Biden administration.
On the second of June, the Interior Department proposed to rescind the 2024 Biden bans on oil and gas development in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve on the grounds that the ban had ignored a mandate from the Naval Petroleum Reserves Production Act of 1976. On December 1, Trump signed into law a Congress-passed resolution to revoke those Biden bans.
On October 6, Trump signed another executive order authorizing the construction of a 211-mile road to provide access to Alaska’s Ambler mining district, a key producer of copper and other essential minerals. He also announced a $35.6 million investment in Trilogy Metals, a Canada-based firm seeking to develop Ambler’s resources, which gives the U.S. government a 10 percent equity stake in the project.
On October 24, the Interior Department announced a sweeping package of actions to bolster energy development, modernize land and resource management, and improve public health and safety for Alaskans. The actions reopen the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas leasing, fund completion of the Ambler Road right-of-way permits, and more.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said that reversing prior restrictions and reissuing permits is a signal that the DOI’s regulatory environment will be more permissive toward upstream and infrastructure development and could shift project economics and capital expenditures timing.
The Trump Alaska initiatives are aimed at opening the door to an economic renaissance across the nation’s northernmost state. In Alaska, the opening of new acreage for minerals development and improving infrastructure could result in increased regional incomes and tax revenues.
With the Biden drilling ban removed, Alaskans are clamoring for a rescission of the EPA’s opposition to the Pebble mine. Gov. Mike Dunleavy, Pebble mine’s developers, and two Alaska Native corporations have filed a combined lawsuit, now before Judge Sharon Gleason of the U.S. District Court, asking that the Biden ban on the Pebble mine permits be overturned.
A separate state-filed lawsuit claims that if Pebble remains a forbidden project, Washington owes Alaska $700 million – the state’s estimate for the value of the mine if built as planned. EPA’s response to plaintiff motions for summary judgment is due on January 2, but some hold out hope that the Trump administration will try to settle the suit and withdraw the EPA veto.
The bottom line. Alaskans want to profit from the development of the state’s mineral wealth. The nation needs copper, oil, and gas, and other critical resources that Alaska can deliver. Much of the oil and gas development is tied to a national mandate long ignored by Washington insiders.
And the Trump Administration quite likely has a few more pro-Alaska development moves up its sleeves. If the president, Gov. Dunleavy, and other Alaska minerals and energy operations have their way, a lot more people and a lot more development will be heading “north to Alaska” soon.
Duggan Flanakin is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow who writes on a wide variety of public policy issues.