$3.6 Billion. 31,000 Jobs.
Zero Cabinet Votes.

Recently I made the case on LinkedIn that states should elevate their Outdoor Recreation offices to full Cabinet status instead of leaving them as a division tucked inside a larger agency. It was, honestly, mostly an instinct — a "why not, what am I missing" argument. It read well. It felt obviously right. And it had no numbers behind it.

So here are the numbers. Not for the country in the abstract — for one state, where the structure is public record and the gap is easy to see. New Mexico already runs a $3.6 billion industry through an office with no vote in the Governor's cabinet. That is not a hypothetical gap. It is a structural fact, and it is fixable with a signature and a bill number.

What follows pulls from more ground than a typical policy memo, and I'd rather mention it now than later. It runs through history, starting with Henry Ford and John Maynard Keynes, and the century-long argument over who gets to keep the gains when productivity rises. It runs through the question of who actually owns a day, and whether the hours a person trades to an employer for income, experience, and a career are leased on terms that can be renegotiated, or simply given away for good. And it runs through the case, plain and direct, for why time spent outside, daily, not occasional, deserves a Cabinet Secretary's seat at the table as a peer, not a request routed through someone else's department. One thing ties all of it together, artificial intelligence: AI is about to free up time across the workforce faster than most institutions have reckoned with, and what happens to that time, whether it gets reinvested in the people who generated it or simply reabsorbed as more output, is a choice this state is positioned to shape before the wave arrives, not after.

In March 2026, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis released the 2024 Outdoor Recreation Satellite Account — the same federal methodology used to measure every other named sector of the economy. New Mexico's outdoor recreation economy generated $3.6 billion in value added, up from $3.2 billion in 2023 and $2.4 billion in 2022, and supported more than 31,000 jobs. That puts outdoor recreation at 2.5 percent of New Mexico's GDP — a hair above the national average of 2.4 percent, and growing at a 6.3 percent compound annual rate since 2019, faster than the state economy as a whole.

Nationally, outdoor recreation generated $696.7 billion in value added in 2024 — 2.4 percent of U.S. GDP, $1.3 trillion in gross output, and 5.2 million jobs. For comparison, the BEA's own farm-production figures put core agricultural output at $222.3 billion, or 0.8 percent of GDP — roughly a third the size of outdoor recreation on the measure that matters most, value added to the economy. Every state in the country has a Secretary of Agriculture. New Mexico is no exception. The sector that out-produces it three to one, by the federal government's own accounting, has a division director.

New Mexico's Outdoor Recreation Division was created in 2019, when Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham signed legislation establishing it inside the Economic Development Department. Since then it has invested $33.9 million in trails and outdoor infrastructure and awarded $8.7 million through the Outdoor Equity Fund, reaching more than 106,000 young New Mexicans. The current director has also represented New Mexico nationally — the state has held the rotating chair of the Confluence of States, the 22-state coalition built around exactly this industry. This is not a fledgling office finding its footing. It is a proven program with a track record, run by someone the rest of the country already looks to.

And the Division reports, two levels down, to a Cabinet Secretary whose desk also holds film incentives, manufacturing recruitment, broadband expansion, and small business lending. None of that is a knock on the Economic Development Department — it is simply what a division does. It competes internally for budget, staff time, and the Secretary's attention against every other priority that Secretary owns. A Cabinet Secretary answers to the Governor and the Legislature directly, can convene other Cabinet Secretaries as a peer rather than request a meeting, and testifies on their own authority rather than through someone else's.

Raw dollar size isn't what drives this distinction. New Mexico's Department of Indian Affairs, Department of Cultural Affairs, and Department of Aging and Long-Term Services all sit at the Cabinet table with budgets and economic footprints far smaller than $3.6 billion. They are there because their missions require cross-agency coordination and a direct line to the Governor — not because they out-earn Tourism or Energy. Outdoor recreation already clears the bar those departments were admitted on. It just hasn't been given its own seat yet.

The case for Cabinet status doesn't end with GDP. The CDC's most recent national estimate puts the annual healthcare cost of inadequate physical activity at $192 billion — 12.6 percent of total U.S. healthcare spending, and the CDC's own standing baseline figure has long been $117 billion. Only 39 percent of Americans live within half a mile of a park. None of that is unique to New Mexico, but all of it is the kind of downstream cost that a department with standing to convene Health, Education, and Corrections could actually pursue as a coordinated strategy — and a division with no seat at that table cannot.

There's a narrower data point worth citing precisely: a meta-analysis of 29 wilderness and outdoor challenge programs for delinquent youth found recidivism rates roughly eight percentage points lower among participants than comparison groups. That's a real, peer-reviewed result, specific to structured juvenile programs, not a claim that hiking lowers a state's general prison population. It's exactly the kind of cross-agency pilot — Outdoor Recreation working with the Children, Youth and Families Department — that a Cabinet department has standing to propose and a division does not.

In January 1914, Henry Ford did something later economists would treat as the practical seed of an entire school of thought. He raised assembly-line wages to five dollars a day, almost double the going rate, justified in his own words as a way to let the people building the cars afford to buy them. Through the rest of the 1920s, Ford's wage policy became one of the most-discussed business stories in the country, cited by economists and businessmen alike as proof that wages weren't simply a cost to be minimized but the fuel consumer demand actually runs on. Economic historians now describe Keynesian demand-side economics as, in effect, a generalization and institutionalization at the national level of an insight Ford had already put into practice at the scale of one company.

John Maynard Keynes published "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" in 1930, into exactly that climate, predicting that a century of compounding productivity growth would leave his grandchildren's generation working about fifteen hours a week by roughly now. He wasn't wrong about the productivity — output per worker grew almost exactly the way he expected. What he may have missed was where the gains would go, and the blind spot in his essay is worth pointing out directly: he formalized the demand-side logic Ford had already shown in practice, but he never considered building in any kind of guardrail to stop a corporation from absorbing that productivity gain onto its own balance sheet instead of returning it to the people who generated it. Ford had shown how one company could choose to pay the dividend. Nothing forced the rest of American business to make the same choice.

Five years before Keynes ever published that essay, in fact, the legal system had already pushed back against exactly the kind of choice Ford was making. In Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., the Michigan Supreme Court sided with Ford's minority shareholders against his plan to keep plowing profits into the company and into lower prices instead of dividends, ruling that a corporation exists "primarily for the profit of the stockholders." That sentence is the most-cited seed of what corporate law now calls shareholder supremacy. The ruling itself sat almost uncited for sixty years and only became the dominant operating doctrine once it was picked up in the 1980s, alongside Milton Friedman's argument that a company's only obligation is to its shareholders.

Ford's wage decision and the shareholder revolt it provoked were both prominent enough, for long enough, that Keynes was almost certainly watching exactly that conflict play out — one capitalist's attempt to pay the dividend voluntarily, checked by the very shareholders whose profits it threatened. Keynes wasn't proposing something new. He was taking what Ford had already tried to do at the scale of one company and arguing it had to happen at the scale of an entire economy instead, where no single court ruling could undo it.

That sixty-year gap didn't close on its own. In August 1971, Lewis Powell, a Richmond attorney two months from being nominated to the Supreme Court, sent a confidential memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce titled "Attack on American Free Enterprise System," urging business to stop lobbying quietly and start building institutional infrastructure on purpose — think tanks, academic influence, a litigation strategy, friendly courts. Within a decade, the number of companies with registered lobbyists in Washington grew from 175 to nearly 2,500. Powell's memo didn't invent shareholder supremacy, but it helped build the machinery that turned an obscure 1919 dictum into the operating assumption of American business by the time the 1980s arrived. 1919 didn't seal Keynes' fate by itself. American business culture chose, and then deliberately rebuilt the infrastructure to keep choosing, to let productivity gains accumulate as capital rather than flow back to the people producing them. A choice that got built on purpose can get rebuilt on purpose, too.

Jack Welch carried that choice from the courtroom and the think tank into the org chart. As CEO of General Electric from 1981 to 2001, he made stack ranking and routine mass layoffs standard management practice, not a last resort in a downturn but a regular tool for hitting a quarterly number. Business schools taught it. Other CEOs copied it. By the time Welch retired, shareholder supremacy wasn't just a legal doctrine sitting in a law journal anymore. It was a management technique with a track record and a generation of executives trained to use it.

I'm willing to risk the added length here because the point underneath it is the one this memo is actually about: the way American business has treated the nine-to-five for the last several decades isn't how it has to be treated going forward, and Outdoor Recreation, as an industry and as a voice, has more standing to make that case than almost anyone else currently at the table. This isn't a call for the industry to stay in its lane, selling gear and maintaining trails. It's a call for Outdoor Recreation to assert itself into the bigger conversation already underway — how the country uses the time and the productivity it has, and whether that time gets spent in service of a balance sheet or in service of the people who actually generated it.

This isn't hypothetical. In May 2026, the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable, the industry's own national coalition, convened the first-ever National Executive Forum on Health and Outdoor Recreation in Washington, putting outdoor recreation CEOs in the same room as healthcare and pharmaceutical executives and the Secretary of the Interior, with the explicit goal of repositioning outdoor recreation as a cornerstone of the nation's health infrastructure. The industry's own trade association is already doing what this memo is asking it to do, treating outdoor recreation as something bigger than gear and trails. That's the same recognition Tymmber has been building toward in calling this the $5.6 trillion Everyday Outdoor market, not a narrow recreation category, but the place where mobility, work, wellness, and recreation all converge. The industry just hasn't been given a seat that matches that ambition yet.

I think AI is the first technology since that essay was written with enough force to actually pay that dividend, if anyone chooses to take it. In my own work, tasks that used to take days, sometimes the better part of a week, I can now produce at a higher quality level in under three hours. And increasingly the gain isn't only about how fast I work when I'm sitting at a desk — it's that an AI agent can keep handling pieces of the company's work even when I'm not the one directly attending to it. The middle block of the day doesn't have to go dark just because I'm not in the chair. That raises the same question Keynes' essay never resolved: once that time is freed up, who actually gets it? Historically, the answer has been more output. There's no rule that says it has to be. It's a choice, not an automatic outcome — and it's a choice most people, and most companies, haven't had to make until now.

This isn't just a personal theory. The UK ran the largest controlled test of reclaimed time the world has seen: 61 companies, roughly 2,900 employees, a six-month trial of a four-day week at full pay, conducted with researchers from Cambridge and Boston College. Company revenue didn't fall. It rose 1.4 percent on average during the trial, and ran 35 percent ahead of the same period the year before. Staff turnover dropped 57 percent. Sick days dropped 65 percent. Ninety-two percent of participating companies kept the policy after the trial ended. Microsoft's Japan office, running its own four-day pilot separately, reported a 40 percent jump in productivity. None of that is AI-specific — it's evidence that time given back to people doesn't have to come out of a company's output. It's evidence the dividend can actually be paid.

And the time doesn't have to be spent passively for it to pay back into the work. A 2024 meta-analysis pooling 42 randomized trials and nearly 2,900 participants found that aerobic exercise produced measurable improvements in cognitive flexibility, working memory, and inhibitory control — the same executive functions a knowledge worker uses all day, regardless of where the exercise happens. Whether doing it outdoors adds a further cognitive edge over doing it indoors is still being debated in the literature — some recent reviews find real benefits to natural settings, others find the gain is mostly the exercise itself.

But there's a separate benefit to being outdoors specifically that has nothing to do with exercise physiology, and it doesn't get the credit it deserves. On my own ten-mile circuit, whether walking the first 5 miles or riding the last five miles, I find myself waving at locals driving by. I say good morning to the woman walking her dog, the older couple out for their morning walk, or the young couple heading out to their morning routine on that desert trail. I nod to the Parks and Recreation crew doing their early rounds before anyone else is up. None of that shows up on a balance sheet or in a clinical trial, but it isn't imaginary. Sociologists call this kind of contact "weak ties" — the casual, low-stakes exchanges with neighbors, acquaintances, and strangers that sit below the threshold of real friendship. Researchers at the University of British Columbia found that people who simply made eye contact and exchanged a few words with a barista, instead of moving through the transaction as efficiently as possible, reported measurably higher positive affect, driven by a sharper sense of belonging. When the pandemic stripped that incidental contact away, people who lost it reported a real decline in wellbeing, independent of what happened to their close relationships. A neighborhood where people are outside enough to wave at each other is doing something for its own social fabric that no clinical trial will ever fully capture, and a state trying to build healthier communities should care about that every bit as much as the numbers this memo leans on everywhere else.

There's a claim underneath all of this worth stating plainly: a person owns all twenty-four hours of a day. The nine-to-five was never the company's by default. It's leased to one, voluntarily, in exchange for income — and a lease has terms a person can renegotiate. AI is what makes that renegotiation credible for the first time, because it changes what a company is actually paying for. Most of what I've called the despair economy in these memos doesn't come from people working too little. It comes from a lease that quietly grew to cover all twenty-four hours, with nothing left defended for family, body, or the outdoors. Reclaiming three of those hours back isn't a perk an employer grants. It's a term the person holding the lease was always entitled to ask for.

Nobody has run a controlled trial of this exact structure yet, and you might be wondering where the tie into outdoor recreation is — but my broader point is that the OR industry and voice is the right voice to assert this need. Yes, I want OR to broaden its voice beyond gear and trails. An AI agent reliably holding down a meaningful share of someone's actual job during the hours they're away is the newest piece of what I'm describing, and the least proven. Reduced hours that don't cost output, and physical activity that measurably improves the cognitive work that's left, both have real precedent today. "Outside Hours" is the model I intend to build into Tymmber's own culture as we grow and as agentic AI matures. But the direction is the point. If even a meaningful share of the AI-enabled workforce starts making the choice I'm describing, the demand on trails, public water, and outdoor access is about to grow faster than a Division embedded inside Economic Development was ever resourced or authorized to plan for. The state that sees this coming gives Outdoor Recreation a seat at the table now. The state that waits gets caught flat-footed by a wave its own economic data should have predicted.

Twenty-two states now belong to the Confluence of States, the coalition tracking a national outdoor recreation economy now worth more than $1.3 trillion in gross output. Pennsylvania houses its office inside the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. Connecticut's sits inside the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. Massachusetts runs its office through the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs. Nevada calls it a Division. New Mexico calls it a Division. Every single one of the 22 — without exception — has organized outdoor recreation as an Office, a Division, or a Commission embedded inside a larger Cabinet department. Not one has elevated it to stand on its own.

That isn't a coincidence and it isn't an oversight. It's the default any new state initiative takes — start small, prove the model, house it somewhere convenient. New Mexico has already done the proving. Six years, three consecutive years of GDP growth in the sector, a national chair rotation, $33.9 million in trail investment, and an Outdoor Equity Fund that has reached over 106,000 young people. The model isn't unproven anymore. It's just still filed under someone else's department.

New Mexico's General Fund has run somewhere between 35 and 41 percent dependent on oil and gas revenue in recent years, and the state's own Legislative Finance Committee has said plainly that this reliance rests on non-recurring, volatile revenue that will decline as production plateaus and the world shifts away from fossil fuels. The Department of Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources sits closest to the Governor in practice because it manages that asset. By the state's own admission, it's managing a depleting one.

New Mexico has also ranked last in the nation for child wellbeing for four consecutive years, edging up to 49th only in this year's report, still last in education and family measures specifically. That's the other half of the same ledger: the state running one of the most economically powerful Cabinet departments in the country by some measures is also the state doing worst by its own kids. Outdoor recreation isn't a side hobby relative to that problem. It's one of the only growing sectors positioned to touch health, family, and community outcomes directly — and AI is about to free up more of the population's time to spend exactly that way, whether this state is ready for the demand or not.

This isn't a request for Outdoor Recreation to outspend or replace Energy and Minerals. It's a request to sit next to it — the same proximity to the Governor, the same standing to set the agenda — because the two departments are solving complementary halves of the same problem: one stewarding the asset the state has always depended on, the other building the one it needs to depend on next.

This isn't a request for more funding, more staff, or more programs, per se. The Outdoor Recreation Division has already shown what it can do with what it has. This is a request to stop asking a $3.6 billion, 31,000-job sector to operate through someone else's Cabinet seat. Elevate the Outdoor Recreation Division to a standalone Cabinet department, with the same proximity to the Governor's office that Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources already has. Give the director who already chairs national coalitions and already moves faster than the state economy a direct line to the Governor and a vote at the table where New Mexico's priorities get traded against each other.

New Mexico didn't wait for the rest of the country before creating the Division in 2019. It shouldn't wait now. Be the first. Let the other 21 states play catch-up — they will, because the numbers that make this case for New Mexico are the same numbers sitting in their own BEA reports right now.