More than 18,000 New Mexicans have lost Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits since last year’s passage of a major Republican tax and spending bill overhauling the federal food aid program, according to data released this week by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
About 10,000 — or about 55% — of the people kicked off the program in recent months due to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act have been children, said Mikayla Ortega, a spokesperson for statewide advocacy organization New Mexico Voices for Children.
“When families have less help buying groceries, they’re forced to make impossible choices between food, rent, utilities, medicine — and that affects a child’s health,” Ortega said.
Between President Donald Trump’s signing of the act in July 2025 and April 2026, SNAP participation has decreased by 4.5 million people nationwide, which Center on Budget and Policy Priorities President Sharon Parrott called “a crisis unfolding in plain sight.”
“People across the country are consistently telling pollsters as well as policymakers that they want Washington to focus on affordability, especially the high cost of food,” Parrott said Wednesday during a call with reporters. “Mitigating last year’s SNAP cuts and staunching the number of people, including kids, losing SNAP would be a good place to start.”
Despite having the highest SNAP utilization rate in the nation, New Mexico saw a 4% drop in participation between July 2025 and April of this year, a relatively small decrease compared to other states.
Forty-nine states saw reductions in their SNAP populations in that timeframe, with many states reporting double-digit percent differences in SNAP populations, the center’s data shows. In Louisiana and Florida, the number of people on SNAP dropped by about 20%. In Arizona, it plummeted by more than half.
Ortega said the “driving force” behind the decreases is a new rule that took effect Jan. 1 requiring people receiving benefits participate in work, education or volunteer service for at least 80 hours per month.
Michael G. Seamans/New Mexican file photo
Researchers from the center and public health experts called on Congress to undo the cuts — something U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Luján proposed in late 2025 — or at least delay the implementation of SNAP cost-sharing between states and the federal government.
State lawmakers authorized $30 million in additional food assistance funding during a fall 2025 special session held in response to federal cuts to SNAP and other programs.
Dr. Andrew Racine, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, encouraged policymakers to think of children as “developing organisms.”
“A hungry child is a stressed child, and that chronic stress will have long-term implications for the child’s health as an adult,” he said Wednesday during a call with reporters. “So, to the extent that we are making policy decisions today about forgoing the opportunity to feed hungry children, we are having consequences that will haunt us going forward a generation from now, and it’s entirely avoidable.”
