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State’s budget requests need to return to earth

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

Kids are always high on the state’s priority list, but in the coming legislative session they’ll dominate the discussions.

The Early Childhood Education and Care Department (ECECD) is asking for a whopping $1.2 billion. The Children, Youth and Families Department (CYFD), now under new management, seeks $422.3 million. That doesn’t include asks from the education departments.

Budget increases face new economic realities.

State economists recently told the Legislative Finance Committee that New Mexico is “treading water” but not at risk of a recession, reported SourceNM. New money (expected revenue minus current spending) has grown just 1%, falling short of earlier projections. Budget cutting may not be necessary, but budget growth isn’t possible either.

Because I’ve been watching for signs of recession, I found some comfort in the economists’ statements, but then I looked at the reports. Nobody should get too comfortable.

Here are just a few comments from the General Fund Consensus Revenue Estimate:

· “Inflation poses serious challenges to the economy.”

· “Expected to be a close call as recession probabilities grow. Minor shocks could trigger a downturn.”

· “Federal policies could have worse impacts than expected in multiple revenues.”

(The report also complains about the president’s war on numbers: “A soft landing is difficult to achieve while flying blind. Data scarcity is also challenging revenue estimates, although New Mexico economists are innovating to provide insight.” That raises a tree-falling-in-the-woods question: If we can’t see the numbers, will we know if we’re in a recession?)

State revenues are down significantly from last year because oil prices dropped and corporate tax revenues plunged, the latter caused by the so-called big beautiful bill, according to the Albuquerque Journal. Add to that the impact of tariffs and federal layoffs. And Permian Basin oil production, which has bankrolled increased state spending, could peak this year.

The news would have been even worse if not for robust sales and leases by the State Land Office. That alone kept New Mexico out of the red.

There are bright spots. State economists expect revenues to improve in the future. And lawmakers wisely tucked away money in special trust funds for future use.

Rep. Nathan Small, chair of the Legislative Finance Committee, said, “This is not a doom forecast, but it is a very sobering forecast.”

Reading between the lines, I would say lawmakers and the governor have no room for error.

As lawmakers were digesting new economic data, ECECD Secretary Elizabeth Groginsky asked for $1.2 billion to expand her department’s activities, including universal child care, universal preschool for 3-year-olds, home visits and early intervention. Sen. George Muñoz, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and other legislators have previously complained about the governor blindsiding legislators with universal child care in November.

Remember that ECECD has its own trust fund, created with the department in 2020. The fund balance will be nearly $10.5 billion this budget year, according to the Journal, but its income won’t cover universal child care. And yet state spending on child care has ballooned until even the proposed increase won’t cover costs. Finally, by covering people who can well afford their childcare, ECECD has unnecessarily raised its costs.

Groginsky stood up the department and grew it during a time the oil industry bestowed ever increasing revenues, and got comfortable with those big numbers. Now she needs to recalculate. Muñoz recently told Groginsky to come back with a more realistic request after the holidays.

Now comes CYFD, asking for a 4.7% increase to $422.3 million to hire more child welfare workers, expand programs, and meet court-ordered case-load standards. Nobody needs convincing of the agency’s need, but the increase is nearly half of the Legislature’s new money.

Finally, there are the governor’s executive orders, which a report warned “could eliminate all new money.” For disasters and other emergencies (like SNAP funding), the governor has discretionary use of the Appropriation Contingency Fund, but it’s run out of money repeatedly. She’s tapped it for $380 million since July 2024, according to SourceNM. She’s also pulled money from the state’s Operating Reserve, a kind of savings account, without legislative approval. Lawmakers have begun to question her legal authority to spend that money.

I’ve covered the Legislature in years when the two finance committees had to make big, painful cuts and look for cash sitting in any neglected account. Thankfully, we’re not there, but the governor and her cabinet need to come down to earth.

Policing fraud in New Mexico’s SNAP program

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

During the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, Texas and Oklahoma farmers who lost everything headed west. Before they joined the great exodus to California chronicled by John Steinbeck in “Grapes of Wrath,” they were hoping to find work picking cotton in New Mexico or harvesting beets in Colorado.

They were not welcomed. The Depression had brought hard times to everyone. Charities were tapped out, and locals didn’t want competition for the modest benefits of the government’s New Deal programs. Even so, people held deeply conflicting views. On one hand they recognized their need for help; on the other hand, they found it deeply shameful to accept charity.

Republicans and a good many Democrats suspected that some of the people on relief were loafers who could and should, somehow, be working.

Our work ethic runs deep in this country. When my husband tells me I’m a workaholic, I say I learned it from the best. The worst four-letter word my parents could utter about somebody was “lazy.”

Now we hear the same arguments in SNAP (food stamp) requirements. And we see echoes of the 1930s in New Mexico Republicans’ call for fraud investigations of the state’s program, the nation’s largest.

SNAP, which serves 460,000 New Mexicans, has been quite the political football this year. First, the so-called big beautiful bill cut the program substantially and increased hurdles for recipients. Then, as the two parties wrangled over Obamacare premiums and shut down government for 43 days, recipients panicked until the state jumped in with emergency funding to keep SNAP going.

Now U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins wants SNAP recipients to reapply, citing “fraud, waste and incessant abuse.” Our own Sens. Ben Ray Luján and Martin Heinrich and other Democrats called it an unnecessary duplication of existing rules.

Here at home, Republican legislators got $50,000 during the second special session to audit SNAP for fraud. They point to New Mexico’s high error rate, which calculates over- or underpayments, according to SourceNM. The Legislative Finance Committee plans to look for errors by either the state Health Care Authority or SNAP recipients, but Republicans want a broader examination for fraud that includes eligibility checks, use of Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards, payments to undocumented immigrants, and nutrition standards.

This follows the report by KRQE of a Truth or Consequences man trading his EBT card for fentanyl. The case started with deputies looking into an overdose death. Sierra County Sheriff Joshua Baker thinks this happens more often than anybody thinks.

But the state Health Care Authority told KRQE this kind of activity is rare and that fraud indicators in the system normally flag misuse. The USDA says fraud cases account for less than 1% of SNAP users.

So the question becomes, what’s appropriate caution and what’s harassment?

My late colleague Harold Morgan once told a roomful of journalists to “look at the big numbers.” By that rule, the SNAP program needs more scrutiny. Its recipients are about 21% of the state’s population, the nation’s highest SNAP participation. And our error rate is one of the highest, which will cost us under the big beautiful bill.

Sheriff Baker said there isn’t much of a deterrent to somebody sick enough to trade food stamps for drugs. The addict in question has two kids and was using his card to buy both drugs and food. Baker wants to see purchase of drugs with food stamps become a felony, which leads to court-ordered rehab and treatment.

Obviously, oversight could improve, and Baker’s suggestion is reasonable.

But how much suspicion is an unhelpful relic of the past? If the user is a tiny fraction of recipients, is it fair to make the rules so onerous that you punish everyone? The USDA secretary’s demand for reapplication is harassment on top of the harassment built in to the big beautiful bill. As I’ve written before, most recipients are working – sometimes more than one job. And each attack on SNAP lengthens the lines at food banks.

The elephant in the room is that New Mexico Republicans are tethered to an administration that has weakened or fired watchdogs throughout federal government. Do they care about anybody else’s fraud or only the fraud committed by poor people?

It’s sad that at a time of year when most of us worry about over-eating, a lot of people have to worry about whether they will eat at all.

Rethinking the American Revolution

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

The USA is a miracle, and the revolution that made it possible could easily have gone the wrong way. These were a couple of thoughts I had after watching “The American Revolution,” on PBS.

Instead of the tidy history I learned in school, the revolution was a sprawling and complex series of events.

What the creators want us to know is that the United States was born of violence and division. And it was as much a civil war as a revolution because a great many colonists were loyal to Britain. They thought rebellion was insanity.

Britain was an empire with a standing army of thousands and a navy of 400 vessels. It traded worldwide. But after racking up debt in a global war, the king levied taxes on American colonies.

We know about the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Colonists saw themselves as good British subjects and resented this treatment by the motherland. After radicals poured tea into the harbor, England’s ham-handed responses only inflamed resistance.

Still, it would be years before the word “independence” was heard. But the bitter, often violent conflict between loyalists and Patriots, as the rebels called themselves, was a current running throughout the bloody eight-year war.

In 1774 the colonies took a step toward unity when they formed the Continental Congress, but its members tried harder to protect their own interests than to work together.

I was proud to learn that newspapers massaged public opinion toward independence. Samuel Adams, a failed businessman but successful politician, wrote frequent diatribes “reminding colonists of their grievances.” Thomas Paine (“These are the times that try men’s souls”) added his pen in 1776. They and others spread revolutionary ideas across the colonies. When the original states later wrote their constitutions, they included freedom of the press and the rule of law.

War exploded in April 1775 with the famous Midnight Ride of Paul Revere and battles at Lexington and Concord, when black and white Patriots and their Indian allies fought the British. In June the Continental Congress appointed George Washington as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army.

In the pantheon of Patriots portrayed in the documentary, Washington is the most striking. The film introduces us to the man behind “I cannot tell a lie.” He was one of the richest men in America and a natural leader. He fought alongside the British in the Seven Years’ War 16 years earlier. At 6’3”, he towered over most men (the average male was 5’7”), had a martial bearing, and was an excellent horseman.

Washington’s job was to turn undisciplined local militias, frontiersmen, immigrants, felons and a lot of boys into a functioning army. A slave owner, he didn’t want black soldiers, but a persistent shortage of troops helped change his mind, and 5,000 black men would serve.

Throughout the war Washington’s army was small, inexperienced and often unfed, unclothed and unpaid. Desertions were rife, and mutinies flared up. Soldiers left at the end of their enlistment, even when he begged them to stay.

When smallpox struck his troops, Washington had his men inoculated, even though it meant they would be out of service for several weeks. It was one of his most important decisions.

Against all odds, Washington had some stunning victories, along with devastating defeats. He showed personal bravery, riding along the front lines in a hail of gunfire to encourage his men. He wasn’t a military genius, said historians, but he was clever and bold. He believed providence favored them.

Both Washington and Congress knew the Patriots couldn’t win the war alone, and when France joined the fray in 1778, followed by Spain in 1779, the Americans’ fortunes turned. Without them, we’d be speaking with an English accent.

In 1783 Washington resigned his commission and rode home to Mt. Vernon. Chosen as president, he served his term and stepped aside, establishing the nation’s peaceful transfer of power.

The film also tells us that the conflict was terrible for Native Americans. Tribes had to decide which side might protect their interests and mostly chose the British. Washington promised soldiers that if they stayed to the war’s end they would get 100 acres of Indian land. This was news to the tribes. Washington’s vision of America was continental, the first hint at the doctrine of Manifest Destiny that pushed tribes from their lands.

Ultimately, our revolution and Constitution became the templates for others around the world. Our newborn democracy limped forward, and despite predictions that it would fail, the great experiment continues to its troubled present.

Fire hazard mounts as FEMA, Forest Service shrink

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

A woman from Mora County told me recently: “We always said we were land rich and cash poor. Since the fire, we don’t even have the land.” Besides fire and flood damage to family property, a road washed out, and nobody has rebuilt it.

U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, D-NM, joined by U.S. Sens. Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Lujan, have chided FEMA’s New Mexico Joint Recovery Office for its sluggish payout of claims for damages caused by the massive Calf Canyon-Hermit’s Peak blaze three years ago. In their recent letter they said the claims office had yet to compensate many people who lost everything. And it refused to reopen claims for cascading events, such as floods caused by the fires.

It’s odd because this disaster has its own pot of money. The fires were the government’s fault, so Congress created a $5.45 million fund to fully compensate victims. So far, the office has paid $3.2 billion.

The claims office could have been more responsive and more efficient, but I think we should look at the mother ship.

In August, 182 FEMA employees informed Congress that one third of full-time staff, some 2,000 employees including some of the agency’s most experienced, have left this year. In addition, the administration has cut funding and failed to appoint a qualified administrator as required by law. They warned that it’s becoming impossible for FEMA to help Americans survive natural disasters.

With no knowledgeable person running FEMA, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has involved herself in FEMA operations and set new spending rules that delayed contracts and obstructed the agency’s response, according media reports. The president himself has no use for FEMA and wants states to shoulder disaster response.

So is it any surprise that New Mexico has seen slow or no response and funding cuts?

This month the state’s Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management said FEMA denied disaster prevention funding for the Ruidoso area, reported Patrick Lohmann of Source NM. The decision “puts lives and property at risk unnecessarily during new or cascading life-threatening flooding events,” said Deputy Secretary Ali Rye, in the state’s appeal.

Many people may not know that one of FEMA’s most important programs provides hazard mitigation grants to help communities plan and rebuild to avoid future disasters. We all watched clips of houses floating away during Ruidoso’s fire-related floods this year. It’s foolish to think this can’t happen again.

FEMA officials reportedly said the state hasn’t fully spent the money it’s received in previous disasters, but Rye argues that FEMA has only provided about $20 million of the $120 million promised to New Mexico for multiple recent disasters.

In September Lohmann reported that FEMA cut $14 million of nearly $30 million promised for the aftermath of Ruidoso’s fires, even though Democratic attorneys general were already suing the Trump administration for refusing to spend mitigation grants approved by Congress.

FEMA abruptly ended a related program, Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, in April that would have provided $4 million. Among other projects was Acoma Pueblo’s plan to reduce flooding risk. New Mexico is the one of 21 states in the lawsuit to suffer cuts to both programs.

All this is happening as wildfire mitigation in the state – prescribed burns and hazardous fuel treatments – plunged by 53% since January, according to a report by Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, an advocacy group.

“The reason we want to thin and prescribe burn and do the pile burning is because we want a healthy forest, and we want to keep it safe so when there’s a fire, we don’t lose the entire forest,” Bobbie Scopa, executive secretary of the group, told KUNM. Scopa was a firefighter for 45 years.

While the Forest Service blames “operational challenges,” Scopa cited the administration’s downsizing of agencies, budget cuts and the government shutdown. The agency hasn’t disclosed an official number, but in a letter co-signed by Heinrich in March, the USFS had lost 3,000 workers and was set to lose 7,000 more. Many were holders of red cards that certify their training as firefighters.

The Forest Service had an 80 million-acre backlog of projects even before the job losses. The responsibilities for the reduced workforce are endangering their lives and health.

Now weather experts say we could see a dry winter.

Pray for rain.

Steve Pearce can bring his best self to BLM appointment

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

During the Vietnam War former congressman Steve Pearce flew C-130 transport planes when the enemy was trying hard to shoot them down. As the president’s newly appointed director of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, Pearce may feel like he’s still in the cockpit.

He’s got a great deal of relevant experience for the job – “at least he’s not a Fox News host,” grouses one BLM retiree I know – but the environmental community is already warming its legal engines.

The BLM oversees about half of all federal land in New Mexico and some 245 million acres of public lands nationally.

Pearce steps back into the spotlight just as the Trump administration has begun to repeal the BLM’s Public Lands Rule and Navajo activists protested the BLM’s possible revocation of the 10-mile buffer around Chaco Culture National Historical Park.

Let’s begin with relevant experience.

He served seven terms in Congress representing the Second District. Pearce has consistently pushed to open more land to oil exploration, but he’s also said the nation should promote all kinds of energy including renewable.

In 2008, during his primary campaign for Senate against moderate Heather Wilson, he admitted, “I’m pretty conservative… but I’m not limited.” As the Great Recession deepened, he supported the spaceport then spearheaded by Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat. He won the primary but lost the race to Tom Udall.

In 2011 he was unanimously elected to chair the House Western Caucus, and he served twice on the House Committee on Natural Resources. After the Western Caucus in 2017 asked President-elect Trump to appoint more westerners to key positions, Pearce wrote that too many Obama appointees ignored local input. Their regulations, he said, “disenfranchised and harmed westerners.”

Pearce has always been a staunch conservative, and he’s been loyal to President Trump, but in 2017 Pearce and the Freedom Caucus, which he helped found in 2015, torpedoed the Republicans’ replacement bill for Obamacare. And he’s opposed Trump’s border wall. In 2018 he said: “The wall isn’t the magic answer. … You’re going to spend billions of dollars and find that it didn’t really secure the border.”

Environmentalists note that he has no use for climate science, wolf reintroduction, or wilderness study areas, but he’s all for selling public lands.

Topping their list of offenses is his longstanding campaign against the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument.

In a 2014 op ed, Pearce said he had worked with local officials, ranchers and conservationists on a solution to protect the Organ Mountains. He introduced a bill that had the blessings of soil and water conservation districts, law enforcement, chambers of commerce, and Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican. The monument would have been 60,000 acres.

But that year President Obama approved a 500,000-acre monument, “the largest land grab nationwide of his presidency” Pearce wrote. “This is not how representative government works.”

Or maybe it is. Pearce doesn’t accept that blue, blue Las Cruces, the state’s second largest city, likes its big monument and has risen to its defense with every mention of downsizing. And yet, there’s a lot of room between 60,000 and 500,000 acres. Clearly, neither side tried too hard to compromise.

Pearce also angered Democrats and environmentalists for being the only member of the state’s congressional delegation to vote repeatedly against the Land and Water Conservation Fund. He explained in 2018, when he ran unsuccessfully for governor, that he supported the original intent of the bill, which called for at least 60 percent of funding to support recreation and conservation, but over time, a majority of funding went to land acquisition.

However, a spokesperson for the House Committee on Natural Resources said funding that year was evenly divided between recreational planning, acquiring land and water, and developing outdoor recreational facilities. The Albuquerque Journal editorialized that Pearce had a long record of working to undermine the fund.

At 78, Pearce is capping a long, eventful career. He has a better sense than most people of what western lands can deliver. As a New Mexican he must have some appreciation for Chaco Canyon and, we hope, respect for the people who consider it a sacred place.

Democrats and environmentalists are expecting the worst. Pearce has at times attacked anyone with different views, but in a 2018 interview he talked about angry political rhetoric. “It’s time for us to take a look in the mirror and throttle down,” he said.

We hope this is the Steve Pearce who steps up to lead the agency and manage the land for everyone.

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