Co-sponsor Sen. Shannon Pinto, D-Tohatchi

By MARGARET O’HARA
The Santa Fe New Mexican

DEI is not dead yet in New Mexico. 

Amid increasing hostility from the Trump administration toward diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, a state Senate committee on Sunday advanced a “Diversity Act” that would create positions in the State Personnel Office and other agencies to lead DEI efforts. 

The Health and Public Affairs Committee — the first stop for Senate Bill 356 as the 60-day legislative session heads into its final two weeks — voted 6-3 to approve the proposal after less than 15 minutes of debate.

It heads next to the Senate Finance Committee.

“This is an important bill to me personally because it attempts to provide equity and inclusion within state government, which is funded by taxpayers. And I think that our taxpayers deserve to see themselves in state government,” said Sen. Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, D-Albuquerque, a co-sponsor of SB 356. 

But Sen. Larry Scott, R-Hobbs, noted federal efforts to dismantle DEI programs. “This bill is really late to the party,” he said. “DEI has been discredited both in government service and the private sector now, and that pendulum is swinging back the other way, toward merit-based employment decisions.”

On the second day of his second term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to roll back long-standing diversity, equity and inclusion programs and promised to restore “merit-based opportunity” in government, corporations, banks, medicine, law enforcement and higher education, among other institutions. 

“In case after tragic case, the American people have witnessed first-hand the disastrous consequences of illegal, pernicious discrimination that has prioritized how people were born instead of what they were capable of doing,” the order states. 

In another order — which went into effect on his first day in office — Trump vowed to end “radical and wasteful government DEI programs.” The order called on federal agencies to terminate all positions pertaining to DEI and “environmental justice” offices. 

The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency has an online “wall of receipts” that logs contracts canceled by the Trump administration. It catalogs more than 100 scrapped DEI plans.

SB 356 would add a “chief diversity officer” to the New Mexico State Personnel Office to “lead the development and implementation of proactive diversity, equality, equity and inclusion initiatives,” including establishing training and outreach requirements, conducting regular diversity evaluations of state agencies and producing an annual report. 

Under the bill, each state agency would also designate a “diversity and inclusion liaison” to collaborate with the agency head and chief diversity officer. 

And the bill would provide $250,000 to the personnel agency to make these changes.

“It’s not to really exclude; it’s to include,” co-sponsor Sen. Shannon Pinto, D-Tohatchi, told the Health and Public Affairs committee. 

Sedillo Lopez framed SB 356 as a way to push back against “attacks on diversity equity and inclusion” by other states and the federal government.

“We are a majority minority state. That is, we are a state that is severely underrepresented given our population in all facets — education, employment, state employment, leadership, politics,” she said during Sunday’s committee meeting. 

Sedillo Lopez added, “While strides have been made over the last few decades … we’re beginning to see reversals — huge reversals — on that, particularly in other states and at the national level.”