Via Alicia Inez Guzmán at Source New Mexico, we learn that the federal government is no longer paying the cost of monitoring Rio Grande flows at the intake to Santa Fe communities’ Buckman Direct Diversion as part of a joint effort to ensure that contamination from nuclear weapons work at Los Alamos National Laboratory doesn’t get into Santa Fe’s drinking water:

the provision to pay for water sampling was “the stickiest point” of negotiating the MOU’s fifth renewal, said Justin Greene, a Santa Fe County commissioner and former Buckman board chair. The negotiations began the year before, he added, but the Energy Department’s rebuff hardened in 2025, the year the MOU expired. It was also the beginning of the second Trump presidency. 

With the expiration, the rolling $96,000 that once funded annual stormwater sampling by an outside contractor was officially cut off and a new MOU was signed, effective in 2026, without it.

For the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons program, with a budget of something like $4b this year at Los Alamos, the $96k monitoring cost is change in among the couch cushions. I’d even characterize it as couch cushion change in the ~$300m DOE-lab budget for environmental cleanup of all the old messes left over from eight decades of nuclear weapons development.

As friend of Inkstain Kyle Harwood noted, Santa Fe’s drinking water is safe:

There is no risk to the drinking water quality, according to the Buckman’s consulting attorney Kyle Harwood, and the early notification system has continuously operated, even when the MOU expired. But until it can find another source of funding, the Buckman’s three partners plan to cover the costs of sampling for the lab’s contaminants through an ongoing cost-sharing agreement.

It just means that the Santa Fe/Buckman ratepayers will have to come up with the money themselves, rather than the party responsible for the risk picking up the cost.