Where is the money coming from to keep these services afloat? The federal funding environment seems less magnanimous these days, plus as other have pointed out, New Mexico is not an economic powerhouse.

The NM state government has had surplus revenue for a few decades due to taxes on natural gas and oil, first in the northwest, which has since dried up, and now in the southeast. Previous state governments had the foresight to structure things such that this money goes into a trust fund from which the state draws interest. Of course all that money is a very tempting source to fund programs, and every session there are debates about increasing the amount drawn from the fund, for something or another.

I have to admit that with everything else that has been going on politically, I haven't followed this latest push for universal child care, and don't know if the way they are funding it is sustainable. But previous pushes for preschool funding, etc weren't IMO; they were based on pretty optimistic estimates of both fund performance and economic returns from the preschool programs.

Oklahoma has had free pre-K for years now. If a red state like Oklahoma can figure out how to fund child care, it should be easy for New Mexico to do something similar.