The Museum State: New Mexico's Leaders Keep Building Grievance Monuments

On Friday, four months from the end of her second term and in the middle of a run for lieutenant governor, State Land Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard signed an executive order banning new uranium leasing on the thirteen million mineral acres she oversees. She said the quiet part out loud at the press conference: the environmental risk "outweighs any potential revenues to state coffers."

Translation: the schools can wait. The kids can wait. The state that ranks 50th in child well-being for the fifth year running can wait. Not because there is a uranium mine on the horizon — there isn't a single pending proposal — but because a Democratic land commissioner running statewide needed a symbolic win, and the ghosts of the 1950s were available.

This is how New Mexico governs now. Not by asking what would move the state forward, but by asking which historical wound can be re-dressed in time for the next campaign cycle.

The math she does not want you to do

The State Land Office pushed roughly $2.5 billion to schools, universities, and hospitals in fiscal 2025. The Land Grant Permanent Fund distributed $1.49 billion to beneficiaries — 88.3 percent of it to public schools. Every acre withdrawn from productive leasing is a dollar not deposited into the fund that pays for the classrooms Annie E. Casey just ranked 50th in the nation.

Meanwhile, uranium is trading at $86 a pound spot and $93 a pound on long-term contracts — the highest benchmark on record. The United States banned Russian enriched-uranium imports through 2040, opening a fuel-supply gap the country is scrambling to close. U.S. uranium production doubled in 2025. Wyoming projects its uranium buildout will produce 17,700 person-years of employment and $902 million in state and local tax revenue.

New Mexico, which sits on more uranium than any other state, just walked away from the table. The commissioner shrugged and said the revenue was not worth it — as if she, and not the eleventh grader in Gallup reading two grade levels behind, gets to make that call.

Empathy and growth are not opposites

Legacy uranium contamination is real. The San Mateo Creek Basin is real. The fifty abandoned sites still sitting on state trust land are real, and the Diné families living downstream of them deserve a state government that treats cleanup as urgent moral business rather than a rhetorical prop.

But cleanup is a policy. A leasing ban is a different policy. Conflating them is the trick — the sleight of hand that lets a politician mourn the past on Friday, do nothing about the abandoned sites on Monday, and call the whole performance leadership.

The uranium industry of 2026 is not the uranium industry of 1955. In-situ recovery — the method modern American producers actually use — leaves no tailings, generates no waste rock, and does not excavate the land. The World Nuclear Association calls it the most environmentally acceptable extraction method operating in the United States. That is not an oil-company talking point; that is the international body that tracks every operation on earth.

None of this appeared in Friday's press conference. It could not appear. The frame required a villain from a black-and-white photograph, not a regulated modern industry with bonding requirements the commissioner herself has strengthened.

The doctrine of permanent grievance

This is the tell of New Mexico Democratic leadership, and it shows up in every domain. The horse gets replaced by the car, and the state's response is to erect a statue mourning the horse — then tax the car to pay for the plaque over the next 100 years.

Chaco: locked up through 2043. Caja del Rio: locked up through 2044. Uranium: locked up indefinitely. Hydrogen: strangled by the same coalition that ran the last legislature. Oil and gas: kept alive only because it funds the government the same coalition wants to expand. Data centers: greeted with suspicion. Autonomous aviation in rural counties: never considered. Every industrial opportunity of the next thirty years arrives in Santa Fe and gets met by a committee whose first question is which past harm it might extend.

The result is a state that ranks 49th in economic well-being, 50th in education, 50th in family and community, and first in the nation at explaining, at length, why none of this is anyone in charge's fault.

You can care about the past and build the future in the same breath. Any functioning state does it constantly. The refusal to do both is not moral seriousness. It is tunnel vision dressed up as conscience, and it is the operating ideology that keeps New Mexico kids poor while the commissioners who kept them that way move up the ballot.

The question for her successor

The next land commissioner will inherit an executive order Garcia Richard openly admits was written to be overturned. "If a future land commissioner wants to mine uranium," she told reporters, "they're going to have to overturn this, and we will be asking them why they did not uphold this document."

Here is the answer, drafted early and free of charge: because the schools she starved need the money, because the industry she banned is not the one she described, and because a state cannot mourn its way to prosperity.