With federal cuts to food assistance already hitting states, and even more coming down the line, the Legislative Finance Committee told state lawmakers that high rates of food insecurity will likely get worse in New Mexico.
LFC Principal Analyst RubyAnn Esquibel told the Legislative Health and Human Services Committee Wednesday that New Mexico already suffers from some of the highest rates of food insecurity in the country, with 14% of households sometimes or often lacking food.
Almost 30% of households already enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, still face food shortages despite receiving benefits. For households receiving short-term benefits through the Summer EBT program, also known as SUN Bucks, 45% still report food shortages.
As more federal cuts come down, Esquibel said, those numbers are likely to increase. To make matters worse, she says state agencies are finding it difficult to prepare as they wait for federal guidance on details in the federal reconciliation bill, also known as the “Big Beautiful Bill.”
“The rules have not been rolled out, so that's what everybody's waiting on. What are the Federal Rules going to say?” she said. “So that's just the big caveat. We don't know what's going to happen, because we have no federal rule yet.”
Vice chair of the committee, Sen. Linda Lopez (D-Bernalillo), said that uncertainty is further exacerbated by the upcoming federal spending bill that must be passed by the end of the month to avert a government shutdown.
“And who knows what will happen,” Lopez said. “So we're still operating, I think, for us, as a big question mark and what's our best foot forward?”
That uncertainty includes the Health Care Authority, which is responsible for the SNAP program in the state. It has promised to soften the blow of federal cuts to food assistance, but has not yet released concrete details of how that will happen.
Despite that, Esquibel says the state has boosted food assistance programs, with more than $111 million invested in fiscal year 2026. Most of that is allocated through the Public Education Department in the form of the state’s universal school lunch program, which Esquibel says is important to note considering one in four children in the state live in households with inconsistent or inadequate food.
Esquibel also detailed several other food assistance programs available to people including the Women, infants and Children’s Program, the Emergency Food Assistance Program, better known as TEFAP, as well as the Meals on Wheels program and the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, both of which help feed seniors, and more.
But, Esquibel said SNAP helps put food on more plates than any other program by far, with more than 20% of New Mexicans receiving assistance through SNAP. With federal changes, she said, more than 20,000 New Mexicans are expected to lose their benefits just because of the new work requirements alone.
She went on to clarify that people wouldn’t lose their benefits from a lack of working, but rather because of the bureaucratic process and paperwork around the work requirements.
“I think a lot of times people say, ‘Oh, you're not working,’” she said. “Well, people are working. It's just you have to report it.”
Support for this coverage comes from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
