OPINION: While Washington is in chaos, New Mexico is hard at work

Recently, as Republicans in Washington, D.C., passed a massive and deeply unpopular federal spending bill, your state lawmakers were already hard at work preparing for its impact.

Earlier this year, state legislative leaders called for the creation of a new subcommittee to help New Mexico prepare for the drastic federal funding cuts being proposed by President Trump and his allies. As co-chairs of this new Federal Funding Stabilization Subcommittee, we have been anticipating this moment. Now that the bill has passed, we are methodically going through the legislation to understand the full extent of its impacts and determine how we can best protect critical services as these changes begin to roll out.

The bad news is that New Mexico will be hit hard by cuts to Medicaid, food benefits, education and the clean energy sector. All of us are likely to feel the impacts of these funding cuts, particularly in our health care system. Several of our rural hospitals risk closure. Wait times will likely grow, and costs will rise for all of us, as tens of thousands of New Mexicans are kicked off their insurance plans. In fact, unless you make more than $500,000 a year, you’re not likely to see much benefit from the tax cuts in this bill either.

The good news is that several years of strong revenue and sound fiscal policy leave us better positioned than many other states to weather the coming storms. We have saved prudently to prepare for the unexpected, and invested wisely to establish sustainable funding streams for critical needs from health care and education to workforce development and conservation. We have expanded access to health care, helped to shore up our rural hospitals, invested in our food banks so they can serve more people in need, and supported the growth of our clean energy sector.

All of these steps will help insulate our state from some of the worst impacts of federal funding cuts, but we still have much more to do. That work is already underway. We are working closely with the Legislative Finance Committee and other legislative committees to dig into the details of this bill and understand what impacts it might have on New Mexicans’ lives.

Many of the most painful cuts in this federal funding bill do not go into effect for at least a year. So right now, we are paying careful attention to the complicated timeline for the implementation of these cuts and developing recommendations for how we can best protect the services your family needs. We are also evaluating additional cuts and threats to federal funding through executive orders and policy changes, including money for scientific research, Head Start, clean energy programs, and arts and humanities program funding.

No matter what happens in Washington D.C., your state Legislature remains hard at work for you. We cannot backfill every lost federal dollar, but we will do everything we can to protect New Mexico’s working families, our seniors, our veterans, our rural communities and all who are imperiled by these federal spending cuts.