Still, the future of New Mexico’s free, universal childcare system is uncertain: Democratic candidates seeking the governor’s office have promised to double down on the initiative, while the Republicans question its fairness and financial feasibility — with one going so far as to file a lawsuit seeking to invalidate the rules underpinning the expansion.

Lujan Grisham defended her focus on childcare, asserting the state’s free, universal system will be a “game changer” for healthy child development and economic growth.

“In childcare, I really think we have done it as right as you can,” she said.

Less than 20 years ago, most New Mexico lawmakers would have dismissed the idea of a universal childcare system in the state as more punchline than policy, said House Speaker Javier Martínez.

“People would have laughed at us if we talked about universal childcare back then,” the Albuquerque Democrat said.

In 2011, Martínez was fresh out of law school, working as a community organizer for immigrants rights. He and his colleagues started to notice a pattern: Many of the immigrant families they worked with attended organizing meetings with their young children in tow.

“We started thinking: What is the future of our organizing? And we landed on early childhood,” he said.

Organizers and policymakers started to converge around a plan to secure voter approval of a constitutional amendment to draw on the state’s Land Grant Permanent Fund — then about $11 billion and now nearly $39 billion, according to an April report — to pay for a rapid expansion of early childhood programs. The proposal divided Democrats at the time. Martínez said his frustration over the Legislature failing to send the issue to voters led him to run for office in 2014.

It took years, but that plan worked. In 2019, Lujan Grisham — then newly sworn in as governor — signed into law a bill to create the Early Childhood Education and Care Department, based on a plan proposed by Sen. Michael Padilla, an Albuquerque Democrat and longtime advocate for early childhood education.

The next year, the governor signed the Early Childhood Education and Care Fund into law with an initial investment of $320 million. That trust fund has grown to more than $11 billion, State Investment Council documents show.

The Legislature in 2021 approved a resolution to allow voters to determine whether to pull 1.25% more each year out of the Land Grant Permanent Fund, which long has benefited public schools, to boost both K-12 education and early childhood programs. Voters in 2022 overwhelmingly approved the constitutional amendment, which now sends more than $250 million a year from the growing investment fund to early childhood initiatives.

Eligibility for state childcare assistance with no copays also has expanded — growing to include families living at or below 400% of the federal poverty level by 2022. That eligibility limit for subsidized care — $132,000 for a family of four in 2026 — covered the large majority of families in the state.

“There are very few states anywhere that really even thought about a way to create … a revenue stream so that you can start to make this affordable for parents — because you have to start there,” Lujan Grisham said.

Women leading both of New Mexico’s legislative and executive branches also “contributes mightily” to the state’s policy focus on childcare, she added.

Overwhelmingly, the work of childcare falls on women. Women make up about 95% of the early childhood workforce, with Black and Hispanic women working in childcare at a higher rate than the workforce at large, according to U.S. Department of Labor data from 2024. Research from the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, found 14% of New Mexico childcare workers are immigrants.

Meanwhile, women occupy 55% of the seats in the Legislature, outpacing the national average by more than 20 percentage points, according to data from the Center for American Women and Politics. Women hold 57% of New Mexico’s statewide elected executive positions.

There’s a connection between the women working in New Mexico’s early childhood education system and the women who work for them in state government, Lujan Grisham said.

“Mostly women in childcare, mostly women in pre-K, women majority in the Legislature, women majority in statewide offices — I think there’s a lot of synergy there in the state about putting families first,” she said.

As any parent will tell you, childcare doesn’t come cheap.

That’s true even when the state of New Mexico is paying the bill.

This year’s House Bill 2 — the state budget bill for fiscal year 2027 — sets aside more than $1.2 billion for the Early Childhood Education and Care Department. That sum, a little over 10% of the state budget, includes $215 million for childcare assistance.

Lawmakers made sure during this year’s legislative session the free, universal childcare system will be financially stable for the next five years. Senate Bill 241, signed into law in March, will allow the state to draw up to $700 million from the early childhood trust fund over five years, in addition to setting up guardrails to ensure lower-income families are “first in line” for assistance if the state’s economy takes a turn for the worse, Martínez said.

Lujan Grisham acknowledged free, universal childcare is an expensive proposition — “public education is expensive, if it’s universal,” she said — but she sees it as a boost for New Mexico’s economy and a balm to the state’s child welfare challenges.

The governor can recount the objections some New Mexicans have to free childcare: “If people can afford to pay, they should. It should not be universal. … It doesn’t make sense to me. It feels like a giveaway.”

But she argues an adequately resourced, universal system will inspire workers and companies to move to New Mexico, while allowing more parents to join the workforce.

That’s particularly true for essential workers like police officers and nurses, who often paid top-dollar prices for overnight or weekend childcare, Lujan Grisham added.

Meanwhile, research has shown quality childcare contributes to reduced family stress, calmer households, and long-term cognitive and academic benefits for kids.

While no-cost childcare for all families represents a major cost to the state, Martínez said the policy will stick around — largely as a result of lawmakers being “really judicious” in planning and setting up the program’s funding mechanisms.

“As long as I’m speaker, this is not one of those programs that are willy-nilly going to get axed by the whims of the political winds,” he said. “It took 16 years to get us here, and we will ensure that we deliver on that promise in perpetuity.”

New Mexico will elect a new governor in November — and the next person to inhabit the state’s top office might not choose to prioritize early childhood education in the same way Lujan Grisham has.

Both Democrats in the governor’s race — former Congresswoman and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Bernalillo County District Attorney Sam Bregman — in recent interviews voiced their strong support for the state’s free, universal childcare initiative. They have promised, if elected, to keep it going, in addition to bolstering the state’s early childhood workforce through increased pay and expanded training programs.

When her child was young, Haaland said, childcare felt cost-prohibitive; she remembered hiring a babysitter just one time in her entire “life as a single mom.” She said she mopped floors and cleaned bathrooms at an Albuquerque preschool cooperative to get a discount on her child’s tuition.

“Universal childcare would have changed my life,” she said.

She described the state’s push toward a free, universal childcare system as a “worthy investment” that would create economic and educational opportunities for adults while improving academic outcomes for kids. Her affordability policy proposes cutting the red tape involved in revitalizing a disused storefront or building — including by turning it into a childcare center.

“It’s better for our economy. It’s better for our workforce. It’s better for our kids,” Haaland said. “I just think it would be a valuable asset for our state.”

Haaland voiced her support for ensuring childcare workers have avenues for career advancement and better pay.

“They deserve to make a sustainable living. … You can’t raise a child on minimum wage in New Mexico, so we absolutely need to do more to make sure that people can make sustainable wages,” she said.

A father of three grown children, Bregman said his family pieced together childcare by counting on family members — particularly his wife — to watch the kids. With the introduction of the free, universal system, he said, “times have changed.”

He argued quality early childhood education has the potential to yield long-term benefits for New Mexico children, who have long suffered from higher-than-average rates of poverty and lower-than-average academic performance.

If elected governor, Bregman promised to build on the promise of free childcare. He said he’d want to conduct a kind of census of the childcare industry to better understand workforce recruitment and retention strategies, quality improvement initiatives, and whether the state’s existing supply of childcare slots meets demand — including in rural and tribal communities.

“We have to get it right,” Bregman said. “We’re obviously spending a lot of money on it, but more importantly, we’re talking about the most important asset we have — our children.”

Republicans running for governor, however, aren’t sold on the program.

Former Rio Rancho Mayor Gregg Hull and Albuquerque businessman Doug Turner voiced similar concerns about free childcare for all. Both said they support childcare assistance for needy families, but they expressed concerns about the financial sustainability and fairness of a program in which families that can afford to pay for childcare don’t have to.

“I think the state has a role to play in helping people who need help — and I think it needs to be done in an intelligent way [to] make sure that the programs aren’t abused,” Turner said.

He also noted the current workforce can’t meet the childcare demand. “We have a gap that we can’t really close very quickly,” he said.

If elected, Hull said, “My first step as governor is going to be to immediately evaluate the viability and the long-term sustainability of the program. … If we need to peel back the scope of it in the short term until we figure it out, then we need to peel that back.”

He said he plans to work with staff of the Legislative Finance Committee on an “in-depth dive” into the childcare supply and demand — and how the state plans to make up the difference between the two.

“This is going down a rabbit hole that can get out of control and be far more expensive than I think anybody ever thought it could be,” Hull said.

Duke Rodriguez, another Republican seeking the seat, took his objections a step further: He filed a lawsuit against Lujan Grisham, with an eye toward invalidating the rules of her universal childcare expansion.

Rodriguez, joined by state Sen. Steve Lanier, R-Aztec, and Sandoval County father Zachary Anaya in filing the lawsuit, argues Lujan Grisham’s executive branch essentially went about the universal childcare expansion in the wrong way by creating the regulations in November, several months before the Legislature voted to approve funding for the program.

Rodriguez also has raised concerns the true costs could come in far higher than the state’s projections — potentially billions of dollars — and New Mexico can’t rely on federal funding.

“It will be 100% borne by tax revenues and appropriated by the Legislature,” he said.

“Whatever program we ultimately adopt … has to be built to last, not built to simply sound good,” Rodriguez said. “It would be terrible to make promises of access when the capacity is missing.”

A state judge in the 2nd Judicial District Court ruled late last month in Rodriguez’s complaint that Lujan Grisham’s administration must pause the program or present an argument for why the initiative should not be permanently halted. A hearing on the matter is scheduled June 11.

Rodriguez called the ruling a victory.

Lujan Grisham, however, slammed Rodriguez in a statement on Facebook, calling him a “third-tier Republican candidate for governor” and describing his complaint as “frivolous” and a “despicable attempt to mislead New Mexico families and generate headlines for a campaign that is going nowhere.”

She wrote, “Universal child care is in effect and it is NOT being shut down, despite what this desperate candidate claims.”

While Rodriguez expressed his support for assisting needy families, he said in an interview Lujan Grisham’s free, universal system “sounds charming, but [is] probably unlawful.”

“I think providing this kind of support for our New Mexico families is a truly valid aspirational goal,” he said, “but an aspirational goal should not be confused with unenforceable rules and regulations that would put providers at risk, that will put families at risk, and, most importantly, will put children at risk.”