New Mexico officials weighing options in advance of lost SNAP benefits — Pat Lohmann, Source New Mexico
Federal and state officials said Friday they are working on a plan to shield 450,000 New Mexicans from pending lost federal food assistance benefits.
The United States Department of Agriculture informed states earlier this month that due to the federal shutdown, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program had insufficient funding to run after this month, and ordered states not to submit SNAP recipient info to state vendors.
U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) said an “emergency food plan” is emerging that tasks charitable organizations and schools with counteracting the expected loss of $90 million in SNAP benefits for 250,000 New Mexico households.
“As I understand it, it’s a combination of looking at opportunities to scale up food deliveries through school lunch and breakfast programs, as well as increasing the food supply through our food banks and food pantries,” she said.
She directed reporters at a virtual news conference Friday afternoon to contact state officials for more details.
Late Friday, Jodi McGinnis Porter, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s deputy communications director, told Source New Mexico in an emailed statement that the state is “closely evaluating the USDA’s ever-changing guidance and exploring every available option to maintain food assistance for New Mexicans.”
While she did not provide full details of an emergency food plan, she offered a few more details about what will and won’t happen Nov. 1.
For example, she said recipients who have existing balances on their electronic benefit cards from previous months can still use their cards on Nov. 1 or after.
But she said the state is limited in its ability to use its own funds to pay for November SNAP benefits. The $16.6 million lawmakers recently passed during the special legislative session to offset SNAP cuts “cannot be used,” she said, “because most of the funding was appropriated for specific purposes rather than replacing federal SNAP benefits.”
The state is also expediting the delivery of $8 million to food banks the Legislature passed during the special session, she said, but that is only a fraction of the estimated $90 million the benefits are expected to cost, McGinnis Porter noted.
Members of the state’s congressional delegation wrote to USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins this week contending the agency could use contingency funds to make up the shortfall. The USDA in a memo on Friday discounted that idea and also said states would not be reimbursed if they funded the benefits themselves.
Stansbury also said Friday that because the USDA’s Oct. 10 order prohibited states from sending recipient information to vendors, “many states” have interpreted the order to mean they can’t use state funds to refill the Electronic Benefit Transfer cards used by SNAP recipients.
That means, supplemental SNAP funding New Mexico lawmakers passed earlier this month can “flow to our food banks, but it will not be funding that can get loaded on to individual EBT cards,” she said.
To prepare for the loss of SNAP, New Mexico food banks say they are purchasing extra food and gearing up for additional food distributions that resemble those during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Stansbury also compared the expected demand on food banks to what they saw in early 2020.
“I do anticipate this is going to be very similar to the beginning of the pandemic, where you saw thousands of families having to line up at food banks and food pantries to get access to food,” she said. “It is a full scale crisis that the White House is manufacturing that is going to affect millions and millions of children.”
Along with members of New Mexico’s congressional delegation, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez on Friday joined a group of 23 attorneys general denouncing the impending SNAP halt in a letter to USDA Secretary Rollins.
The letter calls on the USDA to account for any contingency funds it has available, what plans it has for those funds and how states should regard the Oct. 10 letter ordering states not to submit SNAP recipient info to state vendors.
The letter also says states have already taken steps to delay November benefits, “which will significantly harm millions of people who depend on SNAP to put food on the table, including children, seniors, veterans, disabled persons, and other vulnerable individuals struggling to meet their basic food needs.”
The letter also argues USDA has no legal basis to prohibit states from sending already-calculated November benefits to EBT vendors, and it says contingency funds remain available to keep benefits flowing.
“It is irresponsible to direct states to withhold this contingency funding, a decision which, if upheld, will devastate and cause irreparable harm to families,” Torrez said in a statement. “My office will do everything in its power to ensure these funds continue to be distributed and keep meals on the table for New Mexicans.”
Capacity issues may limit New Mexico’s universal child care program — Sana Dadani, New Mexico in Depth
Starting Nov. 1, New Mexico will offer free child care to every family in the state. There will be no fees to pay and no income limits to sign up, according to the Early Childhood Education and Care Department.
State leaders and newspapers across the country claim it as the first universal child care paid for by a state.
People who support the program say it will help parents keep their jobs, give child care workers better pay, and make the economy stronger – adding it will also help the state’s youngest children who get the care.
“The well-being of kids is tied to the well-being of the adults in their lives,” said Dr. Philip Fisher, a professor of early childhood at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education and director of the Stanford Center
on Early Childhood. “And adults’ well-being depends on their economic circumstances.”
But there’s a problem. New Mexico might not have enough child care centers to actually take care of all the children whose families want help. There simply aren’t enough spots available, especially for babies and families living out in smaller towns.
The state has gradually helped more families with child care assistance since 2019. By 2023, families making 400% of the federal poverty level were able to get help, opening the program to more middle- and higher-income families.
Right now, about 27,000 children across the state get child care, according to the Legislative Finance Committee’s 2025 Accountability Report on Early Childhood. Officials think another 12,000 children will join the program when it becomes universal.
But the committee found, as of this year prior to the new subsidy going into effect, there were only enough openings for about one out of every three babies under age two. The shortage was even worse in rural counties where almost no licensed infant care exists.
The number of child care spots dropped by 3% between 2019 and 2023. That’s mostly because the number of people providing child care in their homes dropped by half, according to data from the Cradle to Career Policy Institute at the University of New Mexico. Most of the drop was in unlicensed home-based care—places that were simply registered as providers.
Not counting those home providers that closed, the numbers would show more licensed child care centers, which have higher quality ratings from the state. But home-based providers are more likely to offer care at night or in a family’s native language. With so many of them gone, families who work night shifts or want someone who speaks their language may have a harder time finding the right fit, according to the institute.
It’s worth noting that the share of assistance going to families at or below the poverty line fell by nearly 3% between 2019 and 2023.
State officials know there are not enough child care options and have announced a $12.7 million fund that offers low-interest loans to build new centers or fix up old ones. They plan to ask lawmakers for another $20 million. The growth will focus on care for babies and toddlers, low-income families, and children with special needs. The state is also working with businesses and schools to open more locations and is trying to recruit new people to run child care in their homes.
To keep workers, state officials plan to pay child care centers more money so they can cover their real costs. Programs that pay staff at least $18 an hour and stay open 10 hours a day, five days a week will qualify for incentive rates.
The state plans to boost child care in underserved communities by making sure workers get fair pay and by using data to make smart choices, said Elizabeth Groginsky, secretary of the Early Childhood Education and Care Department.
Fair wages can help child care workers think of early education as a real career instead of just a temporary job. That means they can build lasting relationships with the children and families they serve, Groginsky said. “We use data to drive our decisions. We just completed a supply-and-demand study with interactive maps showing which parts of the state have the largest gaps. That will guide how we fund applications through the new loan program.”
Even with those plans, questions remain about who will benefit most and how much difference the system will make for children.
While supporters say universal child care is a win for families and the economy, Republican lawmakers argue that removing income limits means taxpayers will now help pay for child care for wealthy families.
Legislative Finance Committee analysts have also questioned the program’s impact on learning. Their 2025 report found that while child care meets an essential need for working families, it does not have the same effect on kindergarten readiness as public pre-kindergarten programs.
But Fisher said the benefits go beyond teaching ABCs and 123s.
Stable, predictable, caring relationships are the foundation of healthy learning and development, he said. That matters more than exposing young children to math or reading skills that they will pick up anyway once they start school.
Healthy child development has more to do with relationships than what kind of child care you use, he said.
“There is not like a prevailing amount of evidence that having a child in a kinder care situation is going to lead the child to be a college graduate [versus] having them cared for by the lady down the street or in your apartment complex is going to lead them to end up, you know, incarcerated,” Fisher said.
Fisher also questioned whether the market alone can give families what they need.
“It’s a broken market,” he said. Parents can’t afford what high-quality care actually costs, employers don’t usually help cover it, and providers often don’t make enough to live on.
When adults are stressed about money, he said, it directly affects children.
“It’s easy to imagine that if you’re an adult who’s taking care of a young child, that if you yourself are worried about not having enough food for you to feed your family, or you’re skipping meals so you can feed the children, or you’re worried about eviction, or you can’t pay for health care, that those things weigh on you and that they take away from your ability to really buffer your child from what’s going on around them,” he said.
Groginsky said the stakes are high.
“The first five years is the fastest period of human development, with over a million new brain connections per second in a baby’s brain,” she said in an interview. “It’s those responsive, nurturing relationships that drive positive outcomes.”
“An enormous hit:” Billions in fed. mineral payments owed to New Mexico could stop by year end — Alex Ross, New Mexico Political Report
State budget analysts warn that federal mineral leasing payments to New Mexico could be at risk if Congress does take action in the coming months.
The payments are from royalties companies pay to the federal government when they extract oil, coal and other minerals from federal land in New Mexico. The state then gets a share of that money.
On Monday, Harry Rommel, a fiscal analyst with the Legislative Finance Committee, told state lawmakers on the Federal Funding Stabilization Subcommittee that those payments could be halted if Congress does not pass legislation to suspend its PAYGO budget rule and stave off steep automatic reductions that would be triggered under a process known as sequestration.
Sequestration was established in 2010 as a means of curtailing a ballooning federal deficit. It mandates that legislation on spending and tax cuts that increase the deficit be offset with reductions elsewhere. Unless Congress agrees to a set of spending reductions or waives the rule, large swaths of the federal budget will be slashed.
Rommel said the reductions are driven by the Reconciliation bill President Donald Trump signed this Summer, which is projected to increase the deficit by $3.4 trillion over the next decade.
“What does that mean? Well, Congress has typically always enacted a suspension when those deficits increase, but they have not yet enacted that suspension, and they have until December 31 of this year to suspend pay-go,” he said.
In 2024, the federal government paid out $4.29 billion of mineral leasing payments to states, of which $2.88 billion went to New Mexico, according to Rommel.
Charles Sallee, director of the Legislative Finance Committee, told New Mexico Political Report in an email Monday that while many areas of the federal budget, such as Social Security, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid and Veterans benefits are exempt from sequestration, the mineral payments are not.
Sallee noted that many of the dollars from those payments go into the General Fund, but some flow into the Early Childhood Education and Care Fund, the Severance Tax Permanent Fund, and, beginning next year, into a new Medicaid Trust Fund.
“Losing a year of federal mineral leasing revenue for New Mexico would be an enormous fiscal hit, and wouldn’t just be a one-time hit. Future revenue from our trust funds for early childhood and Medicaid services would be negatively impacted, as would revenue to the general fund, which primarily funds schools and higher education,” Sallee said.
Rommel said in his PowerPoint presentation to the Subcommittee that the Crime Victim’s Fund maternal, infant and early childhood home visiting programs would also be impacted by sequestration.
The deadline to delay the Pay-Go rules is another item on Congress’ to-do list, as the federal government remains shut down. The Senate is locked in a stalemate over a stopgap funding measure that passed the U.S. House of Representatives but has been unable to garner the 60 votes needed to pass it in the Senate.
House New Mexico Dems denounce NNSA furloughs, push for more info
-Source New Mexico
Two New Mexico Congressional delegation members have joined other Democratic lawmakers demanding the federal government reverse its decision to furlough federal workers overseeing nuclear weapons work and stockpile.
Source New Mexico reports U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright confirmed 1,400 employees across the nation had been furloughed as part of the ongoing federal government shutdown that began Oct. 1. Those employees include 152 National Nuclear Security Agency workers in New Mexico. That leaves only 14 employees split between the agency’s Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories locations. The furloughs are the National Nuclear Security Agency’s first since its creation in 2000. There were no furloughs during previous shutdowns.
Democratic U.S. Reps. Melanie Stansbury and Teresa Leger Fernández, representing the 1st and 3rd congressional districts signed an Oct. 23 letter, along with Reps. Eric Swalwell from California, Dina Titus from Nevada and more than 20 other members of Congress.
The letter, addressed to Dept. of Energy Secretary Wright and National Nuclear Security Agency Administrator Brandon Williams, asks for an explanation of why more NNSA employees were not kept on as essential workers, “given the gravity of their duties” in overseeing the nuclear weapons stockpile and nonproliferation work overseas.
Other questions the letter asks to be answered by Nov. 7 include the administration’s legal basis for furloughing NNSA staff, along with an accounting for the total numbers of staff furloughed and remaining on duty.
The letter, which notes the unprecedented nature of the NNSA furloughs, concludes with a request that the agency reverse its decision.
NM delegation calls on USDA to use contingency funds to pay for SNAP in November - Patrick Lohmann, Source New Mexico
Three members of New Mexico’s congressional delegation said Thursday that the United States Department of Agriculture has all the money it needs to keep food assistance flowing to 42 million Americans in November, despite officials’ claims otherwise.
In a little more than a week, more than 450,000 New Mexicans will likely not receive SNAP payments, according to state officials. That’s because the USDA on Oct. 10 sent state SNAP administrators a letter ordering them not to send SNAP recipient information to statewide vendors due to “insufficient funds” resulting from the ongoing federal government shutdown.
But U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, who represents New Mexico’s 3rd Congressional District, said Thursday that the USDA has access to $5 billion in SNAP “contingency funds” it could use to keep SNAP recipients fed.
“President Trump could act today to make sure families don’t go hungry — but instead he’s using hunger as punishment while taking $200 million from billionaires for a gilded ballroom and sending a $40 billion bailout to Argentina. That’s cruel. That’s un-American,” Leger Fernández said in a statement.
Food and Nutrition Services, the USDA division that runs SNAP, did not respond to Source New Mexico’s request for comment Thursday about why it isn’t using contingency funds — money Leger Fernández said was “set aside specifically for emergencies like this” — to keep benefits flowing through Thanksgiving despite the shutdown.
In addition to the statement, Leger Fernández joined about 180 colleagues in signing a letter regarding SNAP expected to be sent tomorrow, according to her spokesperson. Democratic members of the Senate, including U.S. Sens. Ben Ray Luján and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, sent their own letter to USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins earlier Thursday.
The latter letter also notes the USDA’s contingency funding as one example of the agency having sufficient funding and authority to avoid any lapse in SNAP funding.
“Americans are already struggling with the rising cost of groceries, and they cannot afford a sudden lapse in grocery assistance,” the letter reads.
New Mexico has the highest rate of SNAP reliance in the country, with $90 million in benefits serving 250,000 households hanging in the balance come Nov. 1. Food banks across the state are gearing up to meet the increased demand, though food bank leaders told state lawmakers Wednesday they do not have the capacity to meet an increase in demand for food.
Michael Coleman, Gov. Michellle Lujan Grisham’s communications director, told Source in a statement Wednesday evening that the governor is “carefully assessing options for those whose benefits could be abruptly cut off Nov. 1.”
However, spokespersons from the Health Care Authority, which administers SNAP, and the governor’s office did not provide further comment Thursday about how the state might intervene to save the benefits.
“Gov. Lujan Grisham is fully aware and deeply concerned that food security is in grave jeopardy for nearly a half-million New Mexicans who rely on the SNAP program,” Coleman said.
Día de los Muertos celebration transforms Old Town with ofrendas, globitos and more
-Albuquerque Journal
In Albuquerque’s Old Town, Dia de los Muertos celebrations begin this weekend and will continue through the Nov. 2nd holiday, which falls on a Sunday this year.
The Albuquerque Journal reports observances will culminate with the plaza transforming into a Plaza de los Recuerdos on Saturday, November 1st. Members of the community can sign up for a 6-by-6-foot spot and build an ofrenda in the plaza.
J.J. Mancini, president of the Historic Old Town Association told the Journal last year the event had about 20 ofrendas and they expect up to 75 this year.
Events will also include a Catrina procession, a candlelight procession and other traditional events for the community.
The Globitos Candlelight Glow, featuring tiny hot-air balloons will bring a Burqueno touch to the observances. The globitos will be on the street and church courtyard during the evening this Saturday and Sunday and also next Thursday evening.
The Historic Old Town Association is working with other groups, including San Felipe de Neri Catholic School and Escuela del Sol Montessori, along with Old Town merchants and homeowners.