first-in-the-nation universal childcare program

During a tour of an Albuquerque childcare facility Monday afternoon, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) hearkened back to 2019, when she and Deb Haaland, then a member of Congress, introduced a bill that would have established universal childcare for millions of American families.

Seven years later, Haaland, now the Democratic nominee to be New Mexico’s next governor, is running on a platform to expand the state’s first-in-the-nation universal childcare program, which went into effect late last year.

“As a nation, we invest in infrastructure and roads and bridges and clean water and electricity so that you can go to work,” Warren told reporters gathered at Corazoncitos Felices Academy in southwest Albuquerque Monday. “Childcare is infrastructure. It’s infrastructure for working parents, it’s infrastructure for the businesses that want to hire those parents.”

The program Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced in 2025 makes every New Mexico family eligible for tuition-free childcare. A bill passed in this year’s legislative session requires that the state implement co-pays for high-earning families amid economic downturns.

Warren said she wants the federal government to be a strong partner to New Mexico and hopes to see the program replicated across the nation, particularly as inflation and affordability have become key issues ahead of next month’s midterm elections.

“The world has changed since we first introduced this” in 2019, she said. “We first introduced this and a lot of people were like, ‘Eh, here come the girls again.’ This has become a more urgent, more visible problem.” 

Some providers and parents across the state have advocated for the state to boost capacity, citing lengthy waitlists for children to gain admittance to childcare facilities.

New Mexico childcare providers struggle as demand, waitlists increase

As Warren and Haaland toured the childcare facility Monday, toddlers and children showed off their bilingual education. One teacher, holding up a flash card depicting zoo animals, quizzed her class: “¿Qué es esto?”

Giggling in unison at the picture of a monkey, the children in class responded: “¡El mono!”

Haaland, who served as a national co-chair on Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign, previously told Source NM that she’ll work to increase capacity statewide if elected, with a particular focus on making sure rural areas have the same childcare access as New Mexico’s major cities.

Gregg Hull, the Republican nominee facing Haaland in the Nov. 3 general election, has criticized the program for serving New Mexico’s highest-earning families and has said that if elected, he’d like to re-examine the failed proposals to mandate co-pays for families with high household incomes.

Haaland, who on the campaign trail has often cited her experience as a working single mother, said she will work to strengthen and expand the program if elected.

“I know what it’s like to not afford childcare and to have to clean up my child’s preschool so that I could actually afford the tuition bill,” she said Monday. “I want to see whatever we can do to make sure that we can keep it available. In my opinion, early childhood education should be public school. It’s that important.”

After their tour, Haaland and Warren took turns reading picture books to a group of children and participated in a panel discussion moderated by Olga Grays, a Las Cruces-based childcare provider and state representative for the National Association for Family Child Care.

While Grays praised the universal childcare program, she said childcare professionals across the state have complained that it has not done enough to boost wages for early childhood educators across the state.

Haaland said she’s focused on issues related to affordability and believes that strengthening the early childhood education workforce will have a ripple effect by allowing more parents to work outside the house.

“Let’s be clear: Universal childcare is an economic driver for our state. It creates jobs, it allows parents to have the jobs that they need to have,” she said. “Everyone deserves to have a living wage.”