Don Young, Alaska Congressman and Dean of the House, Dies at 88

Don Young, the Alaska congressman who secured pork-barrel billions for his state over nearly a half-century and became the longest-serving Republican in the House of Representatives and the oldest current member of both the House and Senate, died on Friday. He was 88.

Mr. Young died while traveling home to Alaska, his office said. His wife, Anne Young, was with him.

In a state whose small population allows for two senators but only one representative, Mr. Young, who cultivated the image of a rugged frontiersman with outsize clout in Washington, was sometimes called Alaska’s “third senator.” To this day, most Alaskans have had no congressman in their lifetimes but Mr. Young, who was first elected in 1973, during the Nixon administration.

Early in his 24th term in 2019, he became the longest-serving Republican in House history, surpassing the tenure of the former speaker Joseph Gurney Cannon of Illinois, who as a teenager had followed the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates and went on to serve 23 House terms in three discontinuous segments between 1873 and 1923. At his death Mr. Young was in his 25th term and 49th year in Congress. (John Dingell, a Democratic House member from Michigan for 59 years, was the longest-serving member of Congress in American history.)

When asked in 2020 how long he planned to serve, Mr. Young told The New York Times, “God will decide that, or the voters.”

Mr. Young dated from an era when power in Congress was measured partly by securing of “earmarks,” discretionary spending allocations that lawmakers in both parties use for pet projects in their home districts and states, often by circumventing merit-based or competitive-bidding processes. Known as “pork barrel” legislation, it was often reformed over the years and banned for more than a decade before lawmakers agreed to revive the practice with strict guardrails last year.

In the government funding bill that President Biden signed into law on Tuesday, Mr. Young managed to secure more than $23 million for projects in his state. Among them were the replacement of a fire station in Kodiak that was built in the 1940s and the replacement of an old clinic.