Conservation Voters New Mexico Issues Statements on U.S. Senate Passage of Reconciliation Bill

Conservation Voters New Mexico Issues Statements on U.S. Senate Passage of Reconciliation Bill

[Santa Fe] – July 1st 2025, the U.S. Senate voted narrowly to pass President Trump’s tax reconciliation package, with Vice President Vance casting the tie-breaking vote. The controversial legislation follows weeks of deliberations and has received broad opposition from the public over harmful provisions to cut medicaid funding, gut resources for popular renewable energy and manufacturing projects, and fast-track extractive industry. The legislation now goes back to the U.S. House for concurrence. In response, CVNM Chief Operating Officer Molly Taylor issued the following statement: 

“This bill is the most partisan anti-environmental bill in history. It is a desperate effort to find the funds to pay for the permanent billionaire tax cut. It eliminates funds and jobs critical to diversifying America’s energy production, fighting climate change, maintaining food assistance, managing the response to extreme weather events, supporting students struggling to pay back their loans, supporting energy efficiency and weatherization for low-income families, providing hardworking families with healthcare and maintaining Medicaid, and so much more.

“In New Mexico, the federal clean energy funding on the chopping block has already supported $15 billion in investments in large-scale clean power generation and storage, some of which may be clawed back by the administration. That funding has helped launch or expand renewable energy companies like Arcosa Wind, Maxeon Solar, ABB and GeoBrugg. Also threatened are funds for workforce training programs, wildfire mitigation, forest management, community wildfire and flooding recovery, watershed restoration and resilience, and abandoned oil and gas clean up.

“The cuts adopted by the Senate will raise energy and healthcare costs for everyday New Mexicans, threaten or prevent good-paying clean energy and restoration jobs, and undermine our communities. Rural New Mexico is most exposed to the impacts of climate change – heat waves, flooding, drought, fires – and has the most to lose from the senseless cuts being proposed. The investments being cut  are job creators for our communities, and would protect the Land of Enchantment for future generations.

“We urge all members of the U.S House to reject the reconciliation bill. A vote for the reconciliation package will directly harm our communities by cutting good energy and manufacturing jobs, raising home energy costs for Americans across the country, gutting healthcare and food assistance, and saddling the states with a massive fiscal burden when they try to pick up the cost of these critical programs that the Trump administration is abandoning, all in order to fund tax cuts for billionaires and deregulate greedy corporations.”

Previous iterations of the legislation also include provisions to require the sale of millions of acres of public lands, which was met with fierce bipartisan opposition. Opposition also included a rally in Santa Fe outside the June Western Governors Association convening, with over 2,000 protesters calling for the protection of public lands. The land sale provision has since been removed, but our public lands are still threatened.  In response, CVNM Conservation Director Zoe Barker issued the following statement: 

“New Mexicans know first hand how incredibly important it is that we keep public lands in public hands. Our lands and water are vital to our livelihoods and history, and so many of our families and communities rely on them for our economy and quality of life. These values also stretch across party lines, as witnessed by the outpouring of opposition to proposed land sales regionally and nationwide. We applaud Senators Heinrich and Lujan, and Representatives Stansbury, Teresa Leger Fernandez, and Vasquez for amplifying the voices of so many New Mexicans by opposing these harmful provisions. 

“However, make no mistake: while land sales were ultimately pulled out of the reconciliation package, they are still being threatened. Last month, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced the agency will rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule, which protects almost 59 million acres of National Forest lands from timber harvesting. The Administration has also proposed steep cuts to the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and U.S. Forest Service for FY 2026. This makes it clear that Trump is still pursuing attacks on our public lands through other means, and we are here to join with New Mexicans statewide in strong opposition to these actions. We urge all New Mexico leaders, elected and appointed, to join us.” 

BACKGROUND

• According to an Energy Innovation analysis of the House Reconciliation bill, the bill would increase household energy costs by an average of $120 per year over the next 5 years and $230 per year in 10 years. This would also limit our ability to build new power generation fast enough – new natural gas-fired plants can take as long as seven years to come online – to meet rising electricity demands, and cost our economy more than 830,000 jobs in 2030.
• A Center for American Progress report analyzing the bill shows that terminating almost all federal clean energy investments will increase electricity rates and raise the price of gasoline by between 25 cents and 37 cents per gallon, costing households more than $400 billion on energy over the next decade.
• The Brookings Institution reported that the Congressional Budget Office estimated the bill would reduce federal spending on Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) Marketplace coverage by $301 billion and Medicaid by $806 billion. The number of uninsured will increase by 10.9 million, on top of coverage losses of 5.1 million built into the CBO baseline, for a total increase of 16 million.
• A Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis estimates that New Mexico would have to increase state Medicaid spending by $875 million in FY 2031-34 and could see a decrease in enrollment of 161,000. New Mexico is one of three states with laws that would require them to revisit expansion if the federal match rate decreases and could lead to termination.
• The Institute for College Access and Success reports that the reconciliation bill replaces long standing bipartisan repayment plans for college loans with a complex plan that will leave many, even most, borrowers in default with unaffordable options, while removing the ability to defer payments during economic hardship or unemployment. In other words, the bill achieves “savings” on the backs of student (or parent) borrowers who will have to pay more, even if they don’t have the means to do so.
• NPR reports that clean energy companies began scaling back their plans even before Trump was inaugurated, fearing the outcome we are all seeing now. Since January, there have been $14 billion worth of investment in new factories and other projects in clean energy, electric vehicles, solar, wind, and battery storage, among others canceled because of the uncertainty over what might come. This was before Trump’s chaotic tariff policies and the actual bill unfolded. One industry analyst estimated more than 10,000 announced jobs have been canceled because of the House bill, which would halt $522 billion in investments approved in the IRA from being spent in communities across the country.

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