New Mexico plans to challenge Trump administration request for personal SNAP data - Dan Boyd, Albuquerque Journal
New Mexico is bracing for a showdown with President Donald Trump’s administration over the federal government’s threat to withhold food assistance funding if the state doesn’t turn over personal information about recipients.
State officials were asked by the Trump administration last week to provide five years’ worth of data about Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, recipients within seven days, according to Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s office.
The Governor’s Office described the request, which was also sent to other Democratic-controlled states, as “setting states up to fail.”
“The timing of this demand for five years’ worth of documents, just a few days before the Thanksgiving holiday, was not a mere coincidence,” said Michael Coleman, the governor’s spokesman.
New Mexico and about 20 other states filed a lawsuit this summer, leading a federal judge to issue a preliminary injunction in October barring a federal agency from cutting off administrative SNAP funding to states based on their refusal to share recipients’ personal information. At least 27 states with Republican governors have reportedly agreed to turn over the data.
The new warning, confirmed by the Trump administration this week, could prompt a fresh legal battle.
A spokeswoman for Attorney General Raúl Torrez said Wednesday New Mexico is working with other states on a response to the Trump administration request, which was delivered with the warning that funding to run the food assistance program will be withheld starting next week for states that do not comply.
“We recognize the importance of SNAP benefits for working families in New Mexico and are committed to continuing our fight to ensure its availability for New Mexicans who rely on it to provide for their families,” said Chelsea Pitvorec, the deputy communications director for the New Mexico Department of Justice.
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said this week the names and immigration status of food assistance recipients are needed to root out fraud in the food aid program.
But New Mexico and other Democratic states have argued they already verify the eligibility of SNAP recipients and should not be required to share large amounts of sensitive personal data with the federal government.
The data request marks the latest salvo in an ongoing political tug-of-war that has put food assistance for New Mexico’s nearly 460,000 SNAP recipients — or about 21% of the state’s population — in limbo.
During a 43-day federal government shutdown, Lujan Grisham authorized the spending of $30 million in state funds to cover the cost of SNAP benefits for a 10-day period.
Once that funding was depleted, the governor called lawmakers back to Santa Fe for a special session, during which legislators passed a bill authorizing up to $162 million in additional funding to keep benefits in place through mid-January.
While the end of the government shutdown on Nov. 12 averted the immediate need for that money to be spent, the funding could be available as a stopgap to cover any withheld funds over the next month or so, the Governor’s Office said Wednesday.
Under SNAP, states run the food assistance program while the federal government pays for benefits. But some states, including New Mexico, could face a cost-sharing requirement due to their elevated error rates under a federal budget bill signed by Trump in July.
State Health Care Authority Secretary Kari Armijo has said the state is working to lower its error rate, which was the nation’s fourth-highest at 14.6% as of last year, according to federal data. The error rate refers to accidental overpayments or underpayments of benefits, but does not include fraud or theft.
Meanwhile, members of New Mexico’s all-Democratic congressional delegation sent a letter to federal officials this week demanding the state be reimbursed for the $30 million in stopgap food assistance funding.
New Mexicans face holidays with low flu, COVID vaccination rates - Olivier Uyttebrouck, Albuquerque Journal
Health officials are urging New Mexicans to get vaccinated for seasonal respiratory illness ahead of the winter holidays, but only a small minority are getting the message, judging from state vaccination data.
Vaccination rates for both influenza and COVID-19 have never been robust in New Mexico but appear lower this year than in the past, state Department of Health data shows.
New Mexico physicians say confusing messages about vaccine safety have complicated the job of convincing patients to get seasonal vaccinations.
“It definitely seems worse this year and that seems related to the volume of misinformation out there,” said Dr. John Pederson, a pediatrician and children’s program medical director for Presbyterian Healthcare Services. “It’s a confusing time. There is far more misinformation out there than ever before.”
Only about 9% of New Mexico residents have received a COVID-19 vaccination since Oct. 1, down from 16% during the 2024-2025 respiratory illness season, according to the New Mexico Department of Health dashboard.
Vaccination rates for influenza are somewhat better.
Nearly 20% of state residents have received a flu vaccine since Oct. 1, compared with 27% during the 2024-2025 flu season.
Vaccination rates also vary widely by age group. Among New Mexicans 65 and older, about 43% have been vaccinated for flu this year, and 26% for COVID.
But among children ages 6 months to 4 years, 19% are vaccinated for flu and only 2.3% have had COVID vaccinations.
Both flu and COVID-19 illnesses have ticked up slightly in recent weeks, said Dr. Chad Smelser, acting state epidemiologist for the New Mexico Department of Health.
“Because of that, we recommend that people protect themselves with both the COVID vaccine and influenza vaccine,” Smelser said. “All indications are that although these vaccines are not perfect, they are good at protecting against severe disease.”
COVID-19 infections have declined since their peak in August, but recently have begun to trend upward, he said.
Health officials are urging New Mexicans to get flu shots ahead of the holidays because travel and gatherings increase the risk of spreading illness.
“Early December is a great time to get a flu shot because it takes up to two weeks to build up the maximum protection the flu vaccine provides,” said Andrea Romero, DOH immunization program manager.
Particularly at risk are people with underlying health conditions, those ages 50 and older and children younger than 5. Those under the age of 2 are especially vulnerable.
“I do think all of the messaging has been rather confusing this year,” said Dr. Meghan Brett, an infectious diseases physician and hospital epidemiologist at University of New Mexico Hospital.
Flu vaccines are particularly valuable because they can reduce the risk of serious infections that can require hospitalization, Brett said. COVID vaccinations are particularly effective during the first three-to-six months, but offer continued protection against severe disease, she said.
Not all New Mexico pediatricians report hesitancy among parents to get flu and COVID-19 vaccines for their children.
Dr. Priya Shah, a pediatrician at Journey Pediatrics in Albuquerque, said parents at her clinic have expressed increased interest in getting their children vaccinated for COVID and flu.
“I’ve seen an increased intake of flu and COVID vaccines amongst my patient population,” Shah said Wednesday. “I’ve actually been surprised this year to see that trend, because it hasn’t been that way in previous years. But that’s just within my clinic.”
Children are at greater risk of severe disease from flu, Shah said. She also warned that the flu season could be severe this year based on trends in Australia and Europe.
“I think the vaccine is always important, but even more so this year,” Shah said. “That risk is high in the pediatric population, so all the more reason for families to vaccinate their kids.”
Utility Asks New Mexico for ‘Zero Emission’ Status for Gas-Fired Power Plant - Jerry Redfern, Capital and Main
The Southwestern Public Service Company has asked the state of New Mexico to grant exceptions to the state’s Energy Transition Act for two proposed gas-fired power plants, including one exception that would see approximately one-third of the energy produced at one plant qualify as a “zero-carbon resource” like solar panels or wind turbines.
A second exception would exempt both plants from the act’s zero-carbon requirement, “to preserve system reliability and protect customers from unreasonable bill impacts.”
The two proposed plants would be in Texas, with the larger of the two — called Gaines County Power Plant — to be built just across the border from Hobbs, New Mexico. Even though the two wouldn’t be in the state, New Mexico’s Energy Transition Act requires that all energy sold in the state by investor-owned utilities be from zero-carbon-emission sources by 2045, no matter where it is generated. The act was an early environmental win for Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham.
The request is part of a wide-ranging application the Southwestern Public Service Company, a subsidiary of Xcel Energy, has before the Public Regulation Commission of New Mexico for new transmission lines, extended closure dates for existing coal-fired power plants and eight new power facilities — two each of natural gas, solar, wind and battery systems. The $10 billion plan covers the company’s service area in the southeast corner of the state and parts of West Texas.
While most of the proposed plants would generate renewable energy, the two gas plants would generate 51% of the total energy in the application.
“To pretend that natural gas in some way or another is a zero carbon resource is just a bald-faced lie,” said Camilla Feibelman, director of the Sierra Club Rio Grande Chapter, and an energy watchdog. “It’s profound greenwashing.”
Southwestern Public Service Company has requested that all costs associated with two new solar projects be borne by New Mexico ratepayers.
The majority of Southwestern Public Service Company’s coverage area and energy sales are in Texas, but, according to Xcel, much of the projected increase in energy would be used in New Mexico, particularly in the state’s portion of the Permian Basin, the nation’s largest oil field. More than 50% of the company’s energy sales in New Mexico already go to oil and gas companies to power their wells and other infrastructure with grid-based electricity. Oil and gas revenues are also the state’s biggest single source of income.
According to the application, replacing the two proposed gas plants with renewable energy sources would cost New Mexico customers an additional $5.5 billion and raise residential electricity rates by more than 40%.
And the gas plants may be on the way. “We have already signed and executed contracts for the turbines,” Kaley Green, a senior media relations representative for Xcel Energy, said. “We anticipate a 40-year service life for each of the plants.”
In the application the company requests that all costs associated with the two solar projects be borne by New Mexico ratepayers because they will be built to meet New Mexico Energy Transition Act requirements, “not because they were needed for the overall system.” In addition, it asks for a speedy approval of the solar plants to secure renewable energy tax credits that were enhanced under President Joe Biden but had their timeframes dramatically curtailed under President Donald Trump.
These and other moving parts create an unusually large, wide-ranging and controversial application that landed before the New Mexico Public Regulatory Commission on Sept. 25. The commission plans to reach a decision on the Gaines Plant zero-carbon request by Dec. 10 and a decision on the full application by May 7. Green said that Southwestern Public Service Company began work on the proposal in 2022.
“It is a lot for one filing, but it’s not absurd,” said AnnaLinden Weller, senior policy adviser with Western Resource Advocates, a nonprofit that fights climate change and its impacts across the western U.S. Previously she spent four years as a policy director at the New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department. “It’s certainly the biggest one that I’ve seen, but not by a huge amount.”
Southwestern Public Service Company cites several factors for the size and complexity of the application: It wants to close two aging coal-fired plants in Texas; it sees increased demand from oil and gas producers in the Permian Basin, data centers and other industries; and there are new requirements from the power-sharing system in which the new plants would operate, the Southwest Power Pool. Despite its name, the pool runs from southeast New Mexico north to the Canadian border, balancing production loads from utility companies in 14 states along the way.
In August 2024, the pool raised the production reserve requirements of member utilities like Xcel from an annual 15% to 16% in summer and 36% in winter. (A production reserve requirement is extra power production capacity available for unexpected peak loads.) The new winter load requirement was in part a response to the winter storms of 2021 and 2022 that created sudden, massive electrical demands from damaged energy systems across the Southwest Power Pool.
The request to keep the new gas-fired plants beyond 2045, when New Mexico pledged to reach zero carbon emissions, aims for a possible loophole in the law.
“So there’s a weird thing about the Renewable Energy Act. It doesn’t prohibit fossil fuels per se,” Weller said, so long as the utility can convince the Public Regulation Commission that it will be producing zero carbon electricity for New Mexico customers by 2045 while hitting ever smaller targets along the way.
Xcel’s Green said, “We will continue to work towards compliance with the 2045 goals and adjust our grid planning as we proceed, based on technology and other factors.”
If that’s not possible, Weller said the commission has the discretion to give utilities “wiggle room” for the 2045 zero carbon requirement if the utility faces reliability or affordability issues — both of which Southwestern Public Service Company explicitly claimed in its application. No utility has tried for such an exemption before, Weller said.
In 2020, the commission shot down a gas-fired power plant proposed by El Paso Electric, which provides electricity in parts of southern New Mexico and far West Texas. That plant would have produced about 11% of the electricity that the proposed Gaines County and Tolk plants would generate together. But, “They didn’t have a plan for how it would be possible for them to comply with the Renewable Energy Act,” Weller said — such as asking for exemptions from the act.
Another loophole in the act allows a utility to claim a fossil fuel plant is a “zero carbon resource” if that plant’s use reduces methane emissions “as a result of electricity production” by a 10-to-1 ratio or better of carbon dioxide to methane emissions. Southwestern Public Service Company hired an outside economist to show how electrifying oil and gas operations in the Permian Basin could offset enough methane emitted by wells and associated facilities to qualify roughly one-third of the electricity from the Gaines County plant as “zero carbon.”
“We’re still thinking about that as a legal question,” Weller said. “A plain reading of the Renewable Energy Act [the underlying law for the Energy Transition Act] says that the generation resource has to be zero carbon, not the effects of the generation resource.”
She added, “Are there climate impacts? Yeah. The question is are they big enough or worthwhile enough given what you’re building.”
Both carbon dioxide and methane are greenhouse gasses that contribute to climate warming, but methane is far more potent, producing more than 80 times the warming potential as carbon dioxide in its first 20 years in the atmosphere. The next 20 years are critical for mitigating catastrophic future warming — but that goal may already be out of reach due to increasing oil and gas use. On Nov. 12, the International Energy Agency released its 2025 World Energy Outlook, which concluded that oil and gas demand will not peak before 2050, as previously hoped for — and needed — if the planet is to avoid increasingly frequent climate change catastrophes. The report goes on to say that with the increase in fossil fuel use, “exceeding 1.5°C is now inevitable.” Holding global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels was the stated goal of the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement.
“There is some low-hanging fruit that we can get from electrifying the oil field, and ideally the infrastructure would be communicable to some future replacement industries that might help the state head in some different direction,” said Feibelman, the Sierra Club director.
“But you can’t deny the fact that it basically builds a more permanent infrastructure around oil and gas extraction,” she continued. “There’s this fantasy that we’ll be able to make oil and gas extraction something that’s sustainable in the short or long term, and that’s just not a fact.”
In 2023, Chevron touted a 20-megawatt solar field it built in southern New Mexico to power a nearby gas facility and reduce the company’s greenhouse gas emissions. For a while, the facility was a prominent focus of the company’s social media advertising in New Mexico.
But on the same day that the International Energy Agency released its World Energy Report, Chevron announced plans to build a natural gas power plant in Texas to power data centers. The plant is expected to produce 2.5 gigawatts of electricity, 125 times the amount of the solar field.
When asked about the fossil fuel power plants in the Southwestern Public Service Company application and how they mesh with the Energy Transition Act her administration championed, Gov. Lujan Grisham’s office punted.
Jodi McGinnis Porter, the governor’s deputy communications director, wrote, “Nearly half of this proposal is renewable energy. The same law that sets those aggressive renewables targets provides an exception process for utilities to protect system reliability. We’re confident the [Public Regulation Commission] can make the technical determination about whether it’s truly necessary. We’ll let that process move forward.”
If approved, Southwestern Public Service Company will build the Gaines County plant about five miles south-southeast of Hobbs, a town of about 40,000. The prevailing wind patterns would carry much of the exhaust from the new plant right over town.
“It’s not like there’s some bright-line border separating New Mexico and Texas’ pollution,” Feibelman said, and the region already suffers from bad air pollution. The American Lung Association has given both Lea and Eddy counties — the center of New Mexico’s portion of the Permian — failing grades for their ozone levels. The American Lung Association does not have ozone figures for the Texas side of the basin.
“The Permian Basin is basically out of compliance with federal ozone standards,” Feibelman said. “It’s kids, it’s communities, it’s elderly people that are going to pay the price of this poor air quality no matter where they live.”
Bernalillo County commissioner touts major infrastructure investments in East Mountains — Kevin Hendricks, NM.news
East Mountains residents will see the first major renovation of Los Vecinos Community Center in 50 years, along with new recurring funding for road maintenance, Bernalillo County Commissioner Eric Olivas announced in a district update.
Olivas said he secured millions of dollars for the community center overhaul and obtained ongoing funding dedicated to improving and maintaining East Mountain roads.
“These roads are critical to daily life for our residents, whether it’s driving to work, school, or a doctor’s appointment, we need good roads,” Olivas said in the newsletter to District 5 constituents.
The commissioner recently directed an additional $145,754 in district funding toward a drainage study for Saddle Spur Road, which serves residents in Sandia Mountain Ranch and surrounding neighborhoods. According to Olivas, residents have experienced severe washouts and repeated maintenance issues on the road, which provides critical secondary access to the community. The study will determine permanent solutions to ongoing drainage problems.
Olivas also committed $300,000 in district funding to water resources projects, including $100,000 for watershed restoration efforts in the Rio Grande Basin aimed at reducing wildfire risk and improving water quality and quantity. Additional funds will support agricultural water use efficiency projects in the middle valley, where more than 70% of Rio Grande water goes to agriculture, and research on the effects of private domestic wells on the aquifer and river flows.
District 5 encompasses the East Mountains and portions of southeast Albuquerque, including the Mesa Del Sol area, where a regional sports complex has drawn thousands of young people weekly. Olivas said the facility is approaching capacity to host regional and national tournaments that could boost the local economy.
Beyond district-specific projects, Olivas highlighted county-wide initiatives affecting his constituents, including full staffing at the Sheriff’s Office after years of nationwide law enforcement shortages.
The commissioner also pointed to expanded behavioral health services, including new detox and reentry facilities, and property tax cuts for low-income homeowners.
Through a partnership with the City of Albuquerque called the Bernco Builds Community Initiative, the county has secured more than $80 million in state funding aimed at addressing homelessness.
Olivas, approaching three years on the County Commission, said investments in public safety, affordability and infrastructure improvements show “we are just getting started.”