New Mexico in Focus — on Washington

As is true with most odd-numbered years, the 2025 legislative session in Santa Fe took up a lot of our show’s oxygen in January, February and March. Reporting on and analyzing the workings of state government are core missions for New Mexico in Focus. 

Much has transpired, though, beyond the curved halls of the Capitol in this year’s first few months. Donald Trump has moved back into the White House, and with his administration has come a fundamentally different approach to how the U.S. government should function. From foreign policy, to the size of the federal workforce, to energy production and the planet’s climate, to the nation’s borders, to basic economic philosophy — very little is the same as once it was.

The impacts of this new proposition on New Mexico will be — and already are — myriad, layered and in a handful of weighty instances, outsized.  Ours is one of America’s most federally dependent states in terms of funding, contracts and jobs. We are a real-time study on the horrors of climate change: think water, fire, habitat, culture. New Mexico shares a border with Mexico. And Democrats hold every statewide office, not to mention the whole of the congressional delegation here; while Republicans control the presidency, the Senate and the House.  

An hour of public television each week is a luxury when it comes to making sense of how this state will operate, adapt and change amid this shift in federal doctrine. (Shameless plug: We’ve got unlimited space on our website, YouTube, Instagram and X, as well.) We plan to use all these platforms to explain what’s happening in and to New Mexico under Trump 2.0. And now that lawmakers have concluded their biannual 60-day meet — and with no special session yet announced — we’ll have the time, energy and resources to do that. (We also have a new host. Nash Jones has been in the building two weeks now, and their news chops already are expanding what we’ve been capable of journalistically. You’ll start seeing Nash on the air next week.) 

In this week’s show, we made our first couple forays into focusing on the feds.  Politics Correspondent Gwyneth Doland sat down with Michael O’Donnell, director of UNM’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research, to get a better understanding of how Elon Musk-led funding freezes could hit key federal programs in New Mexico. The answers are somewhat unsatisfying, but O’Donnell does a great job of explaining why — and reviews the landscape of possibilities in an easy-to-follow fashion as well. (Gwyneth also guest-hosted this week’s show, for which we are most grateful.)   

And Senior Producer Lou DiVizio interviewed Steve Jones, the Southern New Mexico-based Republican who ran unsuccessfully against Democrat Melanie Stansbury in last year’s election for the First District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Jones is running again in next year’s midterm election, but the idea was for Lou to focus less on his candidacy and more on his impressions of Trump’s first 100 days in office. A fascinating conversation ensued, and we encourage you to catch the extended interview on YouTube or the NMiF podcast.  

In the coming weeks, you can expect interviews and analysis on how immigrants in New Mexico are experiencing the Trump administration’s stricter border policies; how the Legislature’s failure to pass a digital privacy bill could affect several already marginalized communities; and how political conservatives and progressives feel like things are going with the White House’s new occupant. 

Stay tuned, as the saying goes; we’ve got big plans for the weeks, months and years ahead. 

– Jeff Proctor, Executive Producer