Introducing the New Mexico Impact Lab: 48,000 bills, now searchable
New Mexico's public records belong to the public — in principle. In practice, they are scattered across agency websites, buried in scanned PDFs, and locked inside systems that forget everything the moment a legislative session ends. You have the right to the information; you don't always have a realistic way to use it.
The New Mexico Impact Lab launches today to close that gap. We collect government records that are already public, clean and structure them, and publish them so that anyone — a reporter, a researcher, a curious neighbor — can actually search them.
Two databases go live with this launch.
Three decades of legislation, in one place
The first is a searchable archive of every bill introduced in the New Mexico Legislature from 1996 through 2026 — 48,533 bills across 56 regular and special sessions. For each one you can see its sponsors, the committees it passed through, and, where the Legislature recorded them, direct links to the official roll-call vote sheets. As far as we know, it is the first place the public can search the state's legislative record continuously across three decades rather than one session at a time.
The shape of that record is itself a story. More than 29,000 of those bills — roughly six in ten — are recorded as having died without becoming law, most of them quietly, in committee. Fewer than 8,200 ever reached a recorded floor vote. Attrition, not passage, is the normal fate of a New Mexico bill — and now that pattern is something you can search, sponsor by sponsor and session by session.
Who lobbies, and who pays them
The second database maps influence: 4,485 registered relationships between New Mexico lobbyists and the employers who pay them — 2,015 lobbyists and 1,848 employers — searchable from either direction. Pick a lobbyist to see who hired them; pick an employer to see everyone working the Legislature on its behalf. We publish only the public registration facts and deliberately omit personal contact details.
How we work
We built both databases from public records, and we kept the source of every entry so our version can always be checked against the original. The full approach is on our methodology page. The short version: we publish facts, with sources, and let readers draw their own conclusions. We focus on public officials and institutions acting in their official capacity, and we withhold private personal information — home addresses, personal contacts — even when a record contains it.
A word on what the Impact Lab is not. We are independent and nonpartisan. We are not affiliated with any party, campaign, agency, or institution, and we are not a campaign against any one target. Our aim is a durable public record that outlasts any single story.
What's next
This is a beginning. Campaign finance is next, and court records after that. If you have public records or a tip that belongs in the public interest, we want to hear from you. And if you believe, as we do, that a self-governing state needs its records within reach, you can help keep this work going.
The records were always yours. Now they're searchable.