Nobody Got Fired

New Mexico separated 364 CYFD workers last year and zero executives. Every reform plan on the table protects the people who ran the agency into the ground.

A 17-year-old girl named Jacie sat in a community college classroom in Albuquerque on Wednesday and told five state senators she has been through more than 100 placements in 13 years of state custody. More than 50 schools in her ninth-grade year alone. Office stays beginning at age 13.

She was the whistleblower. She is a minor. The agency responsible for her did not attend — CYFD says it was not invited.

The week produced a great deal of noise around that room and very little of it touched the actual problem. On Tuesday, House Democrats unveiled a slate of CYFD reforms for the 2027 session. On Wednesday, Senate Republicans convened their own task force and promised legislation of their own. Two caucuses, two press availabilities, two claims to the reform mantle. Between them, not one proposal to remove a single person from a single job.

That is the story. New Mexico has spent three years debating the architecture of child welfare and has never once debated the people running it.

The inversion

Start with the number that should end the argument. CYFD lost 485 employees in 2025, and 364 of them were fired or resigned. The agency sheds front-line staff at a rate that would collapse a private business inside two quarters.

Now set that against the other number. New Mexico has the worst child fatality rate of any Western state, with 14 deaths tied to state failures in two years. In April, the Department of Justice released a 224-page investigation built on more than 20,000 pages of records and over 150 interviews, then sued the agency for using confidentiality law to hide its failures from the attorney general who oversees it. In July, the same office sued again after CYFD staff drove a 15-year-old in state care to El Paso and instructed him to walk alone into Ciudad Juárez.

Executives terminated as a result: zero.

That is accountability flowing in exactly one direction. A 24-year-old investigator carrying 30 cases takes the fall for a system designed three floors above her, while the people who designed it stay for the pension. Both reform plans now circulating in Santa Fe treat that arrangement as a permanent feature of the landscape.

What the plans avoid

The House package is not empty. It would:

• Grant the Office of the Child Advocate unredacted case access, staff interviews, and subpoena power
• Ban congregate care for children under 12 and require re-justification every 30 days
• Put CYFD under a three-member independent commission
• Require body cameras and digital notes from abuse investigators, and build a statewide maltreatment registry
• Open confidentiality law to researchers and the press

Read that list again and notice what every item has in common. Each one regulates a process. Not one touches a person. The commission, the registry, the congregate care limits — all of it redesigns the machine and leaves the operators in their chairs.

The Republican task force has the same hole from the other direction. It heard from a child, a child advocate, and a former caseworker who described conditions he had never seen in any workplace, then adjourned with a commitment to draft bills. About what, and applied to whom, went unsaid.

We have watched this pattern long enough to name it. When an institution fails, its leadership proposes structural reform precisely because structural reform is the one remedy that never names anybody.

The just cause question

The standard objection is that you cannot fire state employees. Half of that is false, and it is the important half.

Cabinet secretaries, deputies, and exempt staff serve at the governor's pleasure. No hearing, no grievance, no appeal. A governor sworn in this January can clear that entire layer before lunch, and the current secretary is an acting appointee of an outgoing administration.

Below that line, classified employees are protected by the Personnel Act and can be dismissed only for just cause. But read what the rule says. Just cause under 1.7.11.10 NMAC expressly includes inefficiency, incompetency, misconduct, negligence, and unsatisfactory performance that persists after a chance to correct it. Negligence is in the text. Incompetence is in the text. The employee gets 30 days to appeal to the State Personnel Board or may elect arbitration under the AFSCME contract, and the Board can order reinstatement if the agency fails to prove its case.

So the tool exists. Why has no one used it?

Because the state cannot prove just cause for the failures DOJ documented — the agency never created the evidence. Investigators skipped essential interviews and home visits. A visit that never happened and was never recorded leaves nothing to attach to a dismissal letter and nothing an arbitrator could sustain. The documentation failure protects the people who failed to document, which is what you would expect from an institution DOJ describes as more invested in concealing its failures than fixing them.

Which makes the body camera proposal more consequential than its own sponsors have argued. They pitched it as transparency. It is the evidentiary foundation for firing people. We would like to hear one House Democrat say that out loud.

Culture follows from the same management vacuum. CYFD states it has zero tolerance for retaliation. DOJ found the agency retaliating against foster parents and staff who spoke publicly, and reporting in March described bullying and fear across field offices. Both accounts cannot be true, and nobody builds a culture of fear by accident.

Two fixes

We will not pretend a column solves this. We will offer two changes that attach consequences to individuals rather than org charts.

Convert the Office of the Child Advocate into a real inspectorate. Not a fifth watchdog — the state already has the advocate, DOJ, the Kevin S. arbitrator, and fatality review panels, and adding another body to a body problem is not reform. Arm the office that exists: no-notice entry into any facility, foster home, or field office; automatic jurisdiction over every child death or serious injury involving an open case in the prior 12 months, which is how the Illinois inspector general operates; and findings that publish on a fixed clock, with redaction limited to a child's identifying details. That last clause is not a formality. Illinois has an inspector general and a disclosure presumption and still failed to produce required public reports across more than 1,200 child deaths.

License the profession. Illinois runs child welfare employee licensure through the same inspector general, so findings attach to a credential instead of a personnel file. A revoked license follows a person out the door rather than allowing a quiet transfer to the next district.

For the enforcement tail, look at England, where inspectors enter local children's services on short notice, publish graded judgments, and an inadequate rating triggers monitoring visits, reinspection, and intervention up to stripping the service from the failing authority. Then look at the timeline: Birmingham was rated inadequate in 2010 and did not reach "good" until 2023. Thirteen years, under the toughest inspection regime in the English-speaking world. Anyone promising New Mexico a fixed child welfare system by 2029 is not being straight with you.

The January window

Dawn Walters told the senators Wednesday that it was day 135 of building the Office of the Child Advocate from the ground up. Lujan Grisham appointed her in January; the office is administratively attached to the Department of Justice; her term runs to 2031; and the attorney general can remove her for violating the 2025 act that created the job. When Sen. Jay Block asked her directly how he would remove her, she laughed and answered the question. That exchange is worth noting, because it is the only moment all week when anyone in that building discussed removing anybody from a job in child welfare — and the person on the receiving end had been there 135 days.

Everything else is already built or pending. DOJ has two active lawsuits and roughly 50 recommendations on the table. A Kevin S. status hearing sits on the calendar for late September. What is missing is anyone willing to say failure should cost a job.

In January, a new governor takes office holding unilateral authority to replace CYFD's leadership, requiring no bill, no committee, and no constitutional amendment. It is the most consequential CYFD reform available in New Mexico, and it is the only one nobody at either press conference bothered to mention.

Jacie has been through more than 100 placements. Somebody signed off on each of them. We would like their names.