By SHERRY ROBINSON
All She Wrote
© 2025 New Mexico News Services

During the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, Texas and Oklahoma farmers who lost everything headed west. Before they joined the great exodus to California chronicled by John Steinbeck in “Grapes of Wrath”, they were hoping to find work picking cotton in New Mexico or harvesting beets in Colorado.

They were not welcomed. The Depression had brought hard times to everyone. Charities were tapped out, and locals didn’t want competition for the modest benefits of the government’s New Deal programs. Even so, people held deeply conflicting views. On one hand they recognized their need for help; on the other hand, they found it deeply shameful to accept charity.

Republicans and a good many Democrats suspected that some of the people on relief were loafers who could and should, somehow, be working.

Our work ethic runs deep in this country. When my husband tells me I’m a workaholic, I say I learned it from the best. The worst four-letter word my parents could utter about somebody was “lazy.”

Now we hear the same arguments in SNAP (food stamp) requirements. And we see echoes of the 1930s in New Mexico Republicans’ call for fraud investigations of the state’s program, the nation’s largest.

SNAP, which serves 460,000 New Mexicans, has been quite the political football this year. First, the so-called big beautiful bill cut the program substantially and increased hurdles for recipients. Then, as the two parties wrangled over Obamacare premiums and shut down government for 43 days, recipients panicked until the state jumped in with emergency funding to keep SNAP going.

Now U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins wants SNAP recipients to reapply, citing “fraud, waste and incessant abuse.” Our own Sens. Ben Ray Luján and Martin Heinrich and other Democrats called it an unnecessary duplication of existing rules.

Here at home, Republican legislators got $50,000 during the second special session to audit SNAP for fraud. They point to New Mexico’s high error rate, which calculates over- or underpayments, according to SourceNM. The Legislative Finance Committee plans to look for errors by either the state Health Care Authority or SNAP recipients, but Republicans want a broader examination for fraud that includes eligibility checks, use of Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards, payments to undocumented immigrants, and nutrition standards.

This follows the report by KRQE of a Truth or Consequences man trading his EBT card for fentanyl. The case started with deputies looking into an overdose death. Sierra County Sheriff Joshua Baker thinks this happens more often than anybody thinks. 

But the state Health Care Authority told KRQE this kind of activity is rare and that fraud indicators in the system normally flag misuse. The USDA says fraud cases account for less than 1% of SNAP users.

So the question becomes, what’s appropriate caution and what’s harassment? My late colleague Harold Morgan once told a roomful of journalists to “look at the big numbers.” By that rule, the SNAP program needs more scrutiny. Its recipients are about 21% of the state’s population, the nation’s highest SNAP participation. And our error rate is one of the highest, which will cost us under the big beautiful bill.

Sheriff Baker said there isn’t much of a deterrent to somebody sick enough to trade food stamps for drugs. The addict in question has two kids and was using his card to buy both drugs and food. Baker wants to see purchase of drugs with food stamps become a felony, which leads to court-ordered rehab and treatment.

Obviously, oversight could improve, and Baker’s suggestion is reasonable.

But how much suspicion is an unhelpful relic of the past? If the user is a tiny fraction of recipients, is it fair to make the rules so onerous that you punish everyone? The USDA secretary’s demand for reapplication is harassment on top of the harassment built into the big beautiful bill. As I’ve written before, most recipients are working – sometimes more than one job. And each attack on SNAP lengthens the lines at food banks.

The elephant in the room is that New Mexico Republicans are tethered to an administration that has weakened or fired watchdogs throughout federal government. Do they care about anybody else’s fraud or only the fraud committed by poor people?

It’s sad that at a time of year when most of us worry about over-eating, a lot of people have to worry about whether they will eat at all.