Don't Give Haaland the Keys

Someone is about to get the keys to New Mexico for four years. Not a temp badge. Not a trial run. The budget, the agencies, the schools, the cops, and the revenue that keeps the state from sending you a bigger bill. That is the chief executive's job. We would not hand a failing company to the executive who already managed a piece of it and came back asking for more money. We will not hand this state to Deb Haaland. Gregg Hull gets the keys.

Education

Taxpayers have already bought 10 years of last place. New Mexico has ranked 50th in KIDS COUNT education for that entire run. Haaland’s answer is to bill them again.

Her January plan adds parent and family services, school-based health and dental care, bilingual instruction, and Native-language support. Those are new taxpayer costs. They broaden the school’s job and still do not say what happens to the adults in charge when children still cannot read or do math. Literacy coaching and structured reading are already in use, or were enacted after she released the plan. Putting them on a campaign list is not a turnaround. We predict this expansion will fail.

She has already run a school system. The Bureau of Indian Education sat inside her department. Fourth-grade reading and math were worse in 2024 than in 2019. Eighth-grade math was worse. Eighth-grade reading was flat. She did not turn that record around. It does not qualify her to spend more of New Mexico’s school money.

Hull would tie support to measurable improvement, expand charter schools and school choice, and build skilled-trade pathways. The next dollar goes to results and to a way out, not to a longer list of services around a system the taxpayers have already funded into last place.

CYFD

A bigger CYFD payroll is a taxpayer bill. It is not an answer to who loses authority after the next failure.

Haaland would raise pay, hire more staff, add programs, and eventually hand the agency toward a commission which are the same people that have multiple child deaths on their records. The Legislature has already rejected that commission. The outside monitors on the state’s own child-welfare case warned it might not help and could make the work worse. Her plan still does not name the official who is removed when the same failure repeats. Taxpayers would pay for a larger staff and the same missing consequence.

Hull would spend the authority, not just the money: independent oversight, risk monitoring before the crisis, a review before a child is sent back, and an independent safe-placement board when the file already shows the danger. Pay and staffing can sit inside that system. They do not replace it.

Taxes

Haaland is not cutting your taxes. She is writing a government check and handing you the tab.

She would increase the Child Tax Credit and the Working Families Tax Credit. Those are refundable credits. The check can be bigger than any tax the household owes. A family that owes nothing can still get paid, because its income is low enough to qualify. That is not relief. That is a handout for not making enough.

Somebody covers that check. If you earn too much to get it, you do not qualify for the handout. You pay for it. She has already said who she means: the people she says should pay their fair share. Your taxes go up so their refund can go out. One group receives a welfare payment with a tax form stapled to it. The other group works, earns, and finances it.

That does not attack poverty. It expands it. A bigger check for being below the line grows the transfer. It does not grow a paycheck.

Hull attacks poverty from the other end. Four Steps to Zero takes the state income tax off eligible personal income for the people who owe it, starting with the first $25,000 for a single filer and $50,000 for a married couple, after deductions and exemptions. If you earned it and you owe the tax, you keep more of it including tips and overtime pay. Net business profits stay taxable. He is not proposing a new check for households that already owe nothing. His plan leaves money with people who earn it. Hers pays people for falling short and bills the households that did not.

Childcare

Universal childcare is state babysitting, and Haaland would make the taxpayers carry it with no end date.

“Free” means you pay. The program has no income test. A family with more than $1 million in assets still qualifies, and the state, not the federal government, writes that check. The FY2027 childcare budget is already $606 million. That is the size of the babysitting bill before Haaland adds a single campaign promise to it. She would keep the universal model and send the growing cost to the public. Enrollment does not freeze. Every new toddler is a new claim. A campaign ends. This entitlement does not.

The parent who can afford care gets a subsidy anyway. The taxpayer with no child in the program pays anyway. The household that pays for its own care pays twice. That is not a safety net. That is a permanent state nursery, billed to people who were never asked if they needed it.

Hull says no and limits are needed. Public assistance should go to families who actually need the help, not to every household in the state for as long as the toddler years last. Need is a limit. Universal is a forever bill. We want the limit.

Energy

Haaland spent her career trying to shut down the industry that pays New Mexico’s bills.

As a member of Congress she said she was wholeheartedly against fracking and drilling on public lands. She said she wanted fossil fuels kept in the ground. She cosponsored the Green New Deal. At her confirmation she said that if she had her way, oil and gas leasing on federal and public lands would stop. Then she got the job and did the work. She withdrew more than 336,000 acres around Chaco Canyon from new federal oil and gas leasing for 20 years. Navajo mineral owners said that freeze cut into their chance to lease. She did it anyway. This is not a late conversion. It is the record.

The replacement she wants has already failed the test that matters. A grid built on solar and wind is not firm power and is proving to be a failing investment. The Energy Transition Act leaned on intermittent generation and left the state short of electricity that shows up at night and in a still wind. The regional hydrogen hub New Mexico chased was not selected. The green project was not good enough to win the money, and it is not good enough to run a state. Companies in New Mexico are already building advanced nuclear systems they are not allowed to test or deploy here. That is a policy failure, not a resource failure.

Hull is for the industry that funds the schools, the roads, and public safety. He would keep oil and gas production on stable, workable rules, not on a political clock aimed at shutting it in. He would put nuclear in the state’s future: small modular reactors, advanced fission, and a statute that lets firm power count. New Mexico has the uranium. Haaland wants a moratorium on mining it again. She said the state has given enough. Hull rejects the moratorium. The ore is here. The reactors are the point of having it. We are not locking a fuel source in the ground so a failed green model can have another decade.

Public safety

Haaland would restrict law enforcement, and she would do it for people who are here illegally.

She supports the Immigrant Safety Act, the sanctuary law that cuts local police off from ICE detention contracts and cooperation agreements. She would limit state and local coordination with ICE and work to squeeze the agency’s funding. That is not a zoning quibble. That is a candidate for governor taking the side of non-cooperation. Illegal presence is a federal violation. A governor who will not help enforce it is choosing the violation.

She also sat in the cabinet while the border broke the modern record. Fiscal 2023 was the worst year ever recorded: more than 2.4 million encounters at the southwest border, more than 3.2 million nationwide, 169 people on the terrorist watchlist caught trying to enter illegally, and at least 1.7 million known gotaways since fiscal 2021. Customs and Border Protection seized 27,293 pounds of fentanyl at the southwest border that year. She was Interior secretary for that entire run. She shared the administration with Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas. She had a seat, a voice, and the federal Indian portfolio. She did not use them to demand the border be controlled, or to treat a secure line as protection for tribal nations. She stayed. Hull does not have that on his résumé. He should not have to.

His record runs the other direction. He would enforce the law against illegal entry and work with federal officers, not obstruct them. In Rio Rancho, violent crime fell about 23 percent from 2022 to 2024. He backed the police and kept a clean audit. Not every offense category moved the same way, and a council-manager mayor does not police the city alone. The direction is still the one we want in a governor: support the officers, support the federal law, and do not spend four years in a cabinet that watched the worst border year on record and called it governing.

How she manages

Give Haaland a department and she manages it by ideology and mandate.

She stood up a department-wide diversity bureaucracy and asked Congress to fund the offices around it. That is not a side project. That is how she organizes a workforce: identity first, result later. She ordered educators in the Bureau of Indian Education schools to take the vaccine, with discipline up to loss of the job, and she sold the mask-and-shot regime in public. Compliance was the management system. The EEOC later ruled against the department on religious accommodations. She lost that case.

Tribal nations are suing over her decisions, too. The Tohono O’odham Nation and the San Carlos Apache Tribe challenged the SunZia approval for a failed consultation. An appeals court revived the case on plausible allegations. That is not a finished verdict. It is still her department’s decision on trial, brought by the nations she claimed to represent. A chief executive who governs by diversity office, mandate, and a lawsuit from Indian nations does not get a four-year lease on this state.

The child and the trans bill

This is not a side issue. It is a taxpayer decision about minors, and it is bigger than a sentence at the end of a résumé.

New Mexico’s Medicaid rules already draw the line Haaland’s politics want to blur for transgender issues. Adolescents 12 to 17 can be put on hormone treatment. Puberty blockers are in that coverage. Surgical eligibility is an adult question. Those are not the same act, and they are not the same bill. Washington has already pulled federal money out of pharmaceutical gender treatment for anyone under 18. New Mexico’s answer was to keep paying for the minor hormone treatment with state dollars.

Haaland’s health plan treats gender-affirming care as something government should protect and cover, including the records around it, and she has campaigned as the candidate who will fill the gap if federal support drops. That is a promise to keep the public taxes paying for surgeries. The household that disagrees still pays. The child is not a constituent of an advocacy group. The child is 12, 14, 16, and the state is being asked to fund the drugs.

We will not hire a governor to expand that. Adult surgery stays a separate rule for adults. Adolescent hormones and blockers are not a routine benefit, and they are not a hill the next budget should die on. Hull is not running to grow this program. Haaland is running to shield it. The keys do not go to the candidate who will send you the bill for placing NM kids in these programs.

Four years. One set of keys. Haaland’s offer is a larger public bill, a career spent against the industry that pays it, a cabinet seat during the worst border year on record, and a management habit of mandates, diversity offices, and unfinished lawsuits. Hull’s offer is a cut for people who earn, a school dollar tied to results, childcare limited to need, oil and gas kept in the revenue base, and nuclear — including the uranium under this state — treated as the future. She does not get the keys. He does.