Voluntarily or not, Tangeman takes early leave from state revenue job

Two weeks ago, Gov. Mike Dunleavy said that Revenue Commissioner Bruce Tangeman would stay on the job at least until the middle of December, when the next state budget is to be rolled out.

“Commissioner Tangeman will oversee the rollout of the upcoming Fall Revenue Forecast and the FY2021 Budget, and continue in his role until a replacement is found to ensure a smooth transition,” the governor’s office said in a statement Nov. 15.

But it is not to be.

Longtime state employee Mike Barnhill took over the revenue job today on an acting basis, the governor’s office said in a statement Monday.

The new statement mentioned nothing about a smooth transition.

“Barnhill has a long and distinguished record of public service with the State of Alaska spanning two decades,” Dunleavy’s office said.

Barnhill does have a long record in state government, but his actions and statements in 2019 during the short-lived Donna Arduin era were not distinguished. He served as the willing pointman for the Dunleavy attack on higher education, spreading a lot of nonsense in the process.

Barnhill, along with the former temporary budget director, gave a series of false and misleading statements about higher education to try to justify the Dunleavy attempt to dismantle the university.

One of Barnhill’s absurd claims was his suggestion last summer that the university could sustain a cut of $35 million to research funds by simply finding that amount of money from some other source.

“There is a rationale that underlies that,” he told the UA Board of Regents in July. “The rationale is because in particular, the Fairbanks organized research unit is doing fundraising now, and they’re quite successful at it. The idea of expanding that to include fundraising from third-party sources in addition to the work that they do with federal government does not seem like a bridge too far.”

“I recognize it’s new, it’s disruptive, but I think it’s conceivable and possible that the Fairbanks research unit can expand its fundraising, as well as other researchers,” he said.

It wasn’t conceivable or possible.

In March, he gave inaccurate numbers to legislators and suggested that all the university needed was a better marketing plan.

In June, Barnhill said UA could get more money from other sources because “private universities with no state funds are among the highest recipients of federal research funds: Johns Hopkins, Univ. of Pennsylvania, Stanford, Duke, Yale, Harvard.”

As I wrote in July, “The universities he mentioned as examples are in a different realm than UA and everyone knows that. As a state employee, Barnhill should be telling the truth instead of serving as a political stooge for the governor and Donna Arduin, delivering pure fantasy to the regents.”