The state’s ethics enforcement agency is taking a dark money group to court for alleged violations of New Mexico’s Lobbyist Regulation Act.
In a suit filed last week in Bernalillo County District Court, the New Mexico State Ethics Commission claimed that New Mexico Safety Over Profit, a dark money group featured in a February Searchlight investigation, has broken the law by refusing to disclose the sources of its funding and failing to properly report political advertising expenditures during the most recent legislative session.
In a series of digital and print ad campaigns during the legislative session … Safety Over Profit argued that attempts to reform the state’s malpractice law were dangerous plots from corporations and insurance companies that would harm patients. To support those efforts, the group created and circulated a report containing inaccurate information, Searchlight found. In its lawsuit, the commission is asking the court to force Safety Over Profit to disclose the identities of those involved in its lobbying activities and is calling for civil penalties for its alleged failure to follow the law.
Safety Over Profit, a 501(c)(4) run by political consultant Jon Lipshutz, emerged in late 2024 and launched a campaign to counter legislation aimed at limiting attorney’s fees and punitive damages in medical malpractice lawsuits — factors that doctors, hospitals, insurance groups and others say have contributed to astronomical malpractice payouts and skyrocketing insurance costs.
The organization has deep ties to the New Mexico Trial Lawyers Association. Notably, Damon Ely, a former legislator and former president of the Trial Lawyers Association who authored a bill to raise New Mexico’s caps on malpractice damages, serves as Safety Over Profit’s secretary.
The office shared by Safety Over Profit secretary Damon Ely and executive director Jon Lipshutz in Albuquerque In a series of digital and print ad campaigns during the legislative session, as well as direct outreach to lawmakers, Safety Over Profit argued that attempts to reform the state’s malpractice law were dangerous plots from corporations and insurance companies that would harm patients. To support those efforts, the group created and circulated a report containing inaccurate information, Searchlight found.
On its website, the group called on New Mexicans to “demand corporate transparency” and “disclose medical corporation profits.”
Impact
As acknowledged by the New Mexico State Ethics Commission in its June 10 complaint, Ed Williams’ February 2025 report on Safety Over Profit prompted the agency to launch its investigation.
Now, state ethics investigators are charging the group with violating New Mexico’s laws on lobbyist transparency.
Safety Over Profit “has publicly stated that transparency and accountability are core to its mission, yet it refuses to comply with basic disclosure obligations required by the Lobbyist Regulation Act,” Jeremy Farris, Executive Director of the State Ethics Commission, said in a press release Monday.
At the center of the complaint is an alleged failure to disclose at least $56,000 it spent in 2024 buying advertisements on Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. Those ads were meant to defeat malpractice reform legislation and “to suggest that the fundamental cause of New Mexico's healthcare crisis is not current medical malpractice law but rather the concentration of private-equity ownership of hospitals in New Mexico,” the complaint says. The group also took out at least four full-page ads in the Albuquerque Journal and the Santa Fe New Mexican with the same purpose.
The State Ethics Commission maintains that Safety Over Profit was required to disclose the identities of the contributors to its lobbying campaign, but has not done so.
State Ethics Commission Complaint
The group has long resisted making the identities of its donors public.
“We are a 501(c)(4) organization, a nonprofit that does not have to disclose our donors,” executive director Jon Lipshutz said in an interview with Searchlight in February. “We certainly will not be disclosing our donors, nor do we have to.”
But in its lawsuit, the ethics commission asserts that the group cannot keep its donors secret. According to the complaint, the commission asked Safety Over Profit to make that information public before filing its suit, but the group refused.
Safety Over Profit maintains that it has followed the law. In an email to Searchlight, Lipshutz pointed to a disclosure form the group filed with the New Mexico Secretary of State showing $80,000 in expenditures labeled as a “call to action on corporate transparency.” The document does not disclose that the money was spent on political advertising, or the identities of the contributors.
Whatever the outcome of the court case, Safety Over Profit was successful in its goals of preventing malpractice reform. The target of its lobbying — SB 176, a bill that would have limited attorney’s fees in malpractice cases and sent the majority of punitive damages in those cases to a new public fund designed to improve patient safety — failed after stalling in committee.
Fred Nathan, executive director of Think New Mexico, a nonprofit think tank that helped develop SB 176, praised the ethics commission’s decision to bring suit.
“We commend the Ethics Commission for holding this dark money special interest group accountable,” he said. “The public deserves to know who is secretly funding Safety over Profit’s efforts to obstruct urgently needed medical malpractice reform.”
This article first appeared on Searchlight New Mexico and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
