The $173 million mistake: who's running New Mexico's SNAP program?

New Mexico leads the nation in the share of residents on SNAP. It's also near the top in getting those payments wrong.

In fiscal 2025, New Mexico's SNAP payment error rate was 16.81%, the third-highest in the country. The national average was 10.62%.¹ In 2012, the state's rate was 3.7%.²

That number is about to cost New Mexico taxpayers. Under the federal budget law passed in 2025, states with error rates above 10% will have to pay 15% of their SNAP benefits. For New Mexico, that's roughly $173 million a year.² Because the state's rate is so high, the bill is delayed, likely until fiscal 2029 or 2030.³ The clock is running anyway.

Who's in charge

SNAP in New Mexico is run by the Health Care Authority's Income Support Division. The authority's secretary, Kari Armijo, was appointed by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham. Democrats have held the governor's office and both chambers of the Legislature since 2019. They have controlled the Senate since 1988 and the House every year since 2017.⁴ ⁵ In the last 35 years, Republicans have not had a single year in which they could pass a law on their own.⁴

The error rate climbed under this leadership: 14.40% in 2023, 14.61% in 2024 and 16.81% in 2025.⁶ ⁷ ¹

What the audit found

In June, the Legislature's own budget watchdog, the Legislative Finance Committee, released an evaluation of the program. It called the rise "a decade-long failure."²

• Mostly overpayments: errors were overwhelmingly overpayments, driven by wrong or outdated information about income, household size and deductions. Wages caused 33% of errors, household composition 18% and shelter-cost deductions 17%.²
• Data that wasn't checked: the agency relied on what people said about who lives in their household, without checking it against records the state already has, such as motor vehicle and Medicaid files. 94% of SNAP recipients are also on Medicaid.²
• Fraud nobody investigated: the program's Office of Inspector General investigated only 3% of fraud tips received since 2018. Completed investigation reports fell 40% from 2020 to 2025. New Mexico recorded just 18 SNAP fraud disqualifications in fiscal 2023, the lowest of any state. At the national average, it would have had about 480.²
• Not a money or caseload problem: the Legislature poured tens of millions of dollars into the division, including $51 million in fiscal 2027 for caseworkers and technology. The audit found no link between caseload size and error rates. Caseloads have fallen since the pandemic while errors kept rising.²

An error isn't the same as fraud. Most errors are mistakes in how benefits are calculated.¹ But a program that rarely checks its own data, and rarely investigates when someone reports fraud, can't say much about either one.

The wait

In December 2025, the director of the Income Support Division, Niki Kozlowski, told Source NM the agency had been on track to bring the rate under 10% by 2026. Then it pumped the brakes.⁸

The reason: under the federal law, states with rates above 13.3% got extra time before paying. If New Mexico fixed its rate too early, getting below 13.3% but staying above 6%, it would lose that extra time and face as much as $153 million in costs. So the agency planned what it called a "balancing act": hold off on major fixes until Oct. 1, 2026.⁸

You can call that smart budgeting. It also means the people in charge chose to keep getting payments wrong, knowingly, while families and taxpayers waited.

What the agency says

In its written response to the audit, the Health Care Authority said it agrees with many of the recommendations. It said it overhauled field-office performance management in March 2026, ended self-reporting for income deductions in May, and began reviewing cases before decisions are finalized in June. It's also replacing magnetic-stripe EBT cards with chip cards. Armijo wrote that SNAP eligibility is among the most administratively complex processes in public assistance.²

State Sen. Crystal Brantley, R-Elephant Butte, put it differently: "What we have not had is the political will to act on them."²

What it costs families

While the agency waited, the rules got harder. From July 2025 to April 2026, about 18,000 New Mexicans lost SNAP, more than 10,000 of them children.⁹ Policy advocates say the state has been in a "holding pattern," hoping Congress changes the law after the midterms.¹

What New Mexico needs next

The audit's recommendations are clear:²

• Check what people report against data the state already has.
• Hold field offices to performance standards.
• Publish a single SNAP policy handbook and keep it updated.
• Use data analytics to spot fraud risk.
• Require the Office of Inspector General to publicly report its investigations every year.

The delay is over. Starting this month, every point the error rate stays above 6% is on the people who run the program.

One party. One agency. One number: 16.81%.