Dunleavy needs to cancel Washington, D.C. payments for image polishing

In this time of economic crisis in Alaska, Gov. Mike Dunleavy should stop paying $4,000 a month to Vought Strategies LLC, an Arlington, Virginia consulting company that is supposed to generate good publicity for the governor.

According to the state online checkbook, the governor’s office paid Mary Vought’s media consulting business $4,643 on Jan. 15, $4,000 on Feb. 19, followed by $4,000 on March 10. (The state document also lists a $40,000 payment Jan. 15 on page 816 of the 3,310-page document, but that may be a mistake.)

There are larger extravagances that Dunleavy should eliminate during this crisis, but he can start with this easy one.

Vought, who calls herself a “seasoned political expert,” has worked for Mike Pence, when he served in Congress, as well as for Sen. Ron Johnson and former Rep. MIchele Bachmann, among others. She is also the head of the Senate Conservatives Fund.

She signed a letter opposing the recall last fall that falsely claimed Dunleavy had cut the state’s budget deficit by 40 percent.

Her husband is Russ Vought, a Trump follower who is now the director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Russ “spent much of his past 15 years in Washington as a political brawler, waging war against GOP leadership first as a staffer on the conservative House Republican Study Committee and later as a top official at the Heritage Foundation’s political arm. This endeared him to Mike Pence, who hired Vought when the vice president was a congressman from Indiana,” the Washington Post reported a year ago when Russ became acting OMB director.

One of the controversies surrounding him that became an issue with Democrats was a piece he wrote in 2016, in which he said, “Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology. They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ his Son, and they stand condemned.”

By the way, on Feb. 10, Russ predicted the “coronavirus is not something that is going to have ripple effects” on the U.S. economy. Mary is among those shifting blame away from the Trump administration for its gross mishandling of the crisis.

It’s not clear what Mary Vought is doing for $4,000 a month. What is clear is that she doesn’t have to be doing it at Alaska’s expense during this crisis.