State warns federal funding cuts could weaken LANL oversight

If New Mexico loses the money that pays for oversight of Los Alamos National Laboratory, the state could lose its strongest tool for forcing cleanup before old waste threatens groundwater, air and wildfire safety around Los Alamos County. Environment Secretary James Kenney told lawmakers the state’s DOE Oversight Bureau has monitored LANL, Sandia National Laboratories and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant since 1990, and that the program is entirely grant-funded, with the grant up for renewal next year.

Kenney said federal officials threatened to pull that money in May 2025, even as the New Mexico Environment Department was pressing harder on cleanup. The department said it filed three enforcement actions on Feb. 11, 2026, and began a WIPP permit modification after concluding the U.S. Department of Energy had not prioritized cleanup of LANL’s legacy waste. That waste includes mixed waste dating from the Manhattan Project era through the 1990s, and state officials have warned that leaving it unremediated raises the risk of storage failures and threats to New Mexico’s land, water and air.

The dispute is especially pointed in northern New Mexico, where the state says DOE proposed leaving an 11.8-acre landfill containing legacy waste buried in unlined pits above the regional drinking-water aquifer. WIPP, the federal repository near Carlsbad, has a legal capacity of 6.2 million cubic feet of transuranic waste and is nearly half full, according to the state. DOE has said WIPP is the nation’s only deep underground disposal site for defense-related transuranic waste and has a strong safety record.

In April, the state proposed tougher WIPP permit terms that would require LANL legacy waste to make up 55% of WIPP disposal volume from 2027 through 2031, rising to 75% in 2032. The same proposal would require all waste at a LANL nuclear and chemical waste landfill to be shipped to WIPP by July 1, 2028. State officials also said DOE delayed construction of a new underground disposal panel for more legacy waste until 2035, which they argue undermines the 2023 settlement agreement that was executed Aug. 30, 2024, and replaced the contested 2016 consent order.

The clash has widened beyond waste disposal. In a June 2025 letter, the state criticized DOE and the National Nuclear Security Administration over what Kenney called “historical gross mismanagement” of a tritium-container waste project and imposed four conditions before approval: an independent technical review, a public meeting, tribal consultation and a compliance audit. Nuclear Watch New Mexico and the Los Alamos Study Group welcomed the tougher stance, saying it reflects a more adversarial relationship as federal nuclear spending tilts toward weapons production, including plutonium pit work at LANL. For Los Alamos and nearby communities, the stakes are immediate: whether New Mexico can still force cleanup, protect the aquifer and keep federal nuclear operations answerable to local consequences.