10 big questions about workforce in 2026.
AI, federal funding, and states to watch, among many other things.
2025 was a tumultuous year for workforce in the United States, one that left a lot of big honkin’ question marks (technical term) for 2026.
To start setting the table for the rest of the year, today I’m lining up many of those questions, some of which I think are more provocative than others based on what I have heard around the horn. This list isn’t in any particular order, and it sure isn’t comprehensive. But it does highlight what I think are some of the bigger uncertainties—and key developments—that will drive workforce in 2026.
What happens if AI doesn’t murder all the jobs this year?
As I wrote in November, investors have made a questionable bet on AI-caused mass job loss happening to raise profits, even if they (and the businesses they’re betting on) don’t quite understand how AI will replace workers. At this stage, AI is not an android that can do your job better than you. It’s a power tool that reduces some of the more menial parts of knowledge work. Accordingly, there already are reports of “boomerang” hiring—companies bringing back workers laid off due to AI evidently because AI couldn’t get the job done.
I do think AI will eliminate quite a few roles as the technology gets better, if only because the money expects it. But I don’t think employers are anywhere near having it figured out as to what those roles will be or how to train people in AI, and it’s an open question as to what happens—in politics, business, and technology—if carnage doesn’t match expectations.
Will the Trump Administration spend the workforce money Congress gives it? Will Congress say anything about it if it doesn’t?
I have heard from Republicans puzzled as to why the Administration didn’t spend $50 million tapped for Department of Labor workforce projects in rural Trump Country—or at least why it didn’t explain why it didn’t spend the money. Based on my experience, several noncompetitive awards made by Trump II seemed more about rushing money toward the door before it expired than any sort of plan. DOL took half a year to announce three key projects on expanding Registered Apprenticeship, probably the clearest workforce goal of Trump II.
Yet, over on the Hill, both sides of the aisle have been weirdly quiet about the missing funding. Sen. Susan Collins, the chair of the Senate appropriations committee, has promoted her efforts to include the $50 million in the 2026 budget, but I’m not sure her team has noticed that money didn’t get spent in 2025.
Can Republicans do more on workforce than aspire to put a new coat of paint on federal bureaucracy?
I’m not a huge fan of the administrative setup of most federal workforce programs under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, the federal law regulating the most consistent funding sources for jobs training in the United States. It buries states and localities in too many choices on how to spend the money while overly restricting the choices they can make.
Even still, it’s been frustrating to see how much freight Republicans have put into rearranging WIOA’s bureaucratic structure as a sort of silver bullet for workforce in the United States. The structure is a problem, but it’s very far from all of the problem. I also don’t think there is a strong evidentiary case for how helpful it will be to make some of the changes the Administration recently signaled to states it will allow them to implement. Those changes would include things like cutting localities and (apparently) worker groups out of decisionmaking on how federal cash gets spent.
I do wonder how much of the emphasis on rearranging bureaucratic pieces is due to a lack of options. As I have noted before, Republicans appear ideologically landlocked in Trump II in ways that don’t let them meaningfully engage many of the big questions in workforce, some of which (like AI) could use more proactive and sustained government leadership than what fits with Trump thinking.
Can congressional Democrats expect more from the federal workforce system than its mere existence?
I wrote in November about the increasingly questionable commitment to A Stronger Workforce for America Act, the flawed, failed, and outdated bill that would reauthorize the federal workforce system. Some Republicans seem especially married to it, but some Democrats seem stuck on it too despite it amplifying many of the (Republican-developed) restrictions and issues in WIOA.
So far as I can tell, the commitment from Democratic lawmakers seems to be about simply maintaining the existence of the workforce system, however flawed it may be. I’m not sure that’s a winning political stance, and it’s certainly not what’s needed to get more workers into jobs that need filling.
With Republicans focused on bureaucratic makeovers, there is a lane for Democrats to create their own workforce reforms that are very much focused on affordability, access, and quality of services. Will they try to find it?
Can DOL keep it together?
DOL’s Employment and Training Administration probably had 25 percent too many responsibilities before DOL lost a fifth of its staff and the Trump White House dumped much of the Department of Education into ETA in 2025. The initial move of Ed workforce programs to DOL appears to have been rocky, something Ed acknowledged in internal documents, as reported by Government Executive. As noted in a recent congressional hearing, the Administration seemingly (and unintentionally) bragged in a fact sheet that it had not gotten money to all grantees for one key Ed program. That’s unideal.
Speaking from experience, the greatest weakness of a Trump Administration can be execution. Jumping from provocative thing to provocative thing doesn’t require a whole lot of attention to detail, and corners can end up cut for the sake of just being “done” with a move. Yet, the corners are really what matters in making a big transition like combining Ed and DOL. The Administration got some stronger-than-expected political pushback over the summer after holding up Ed programs, of the type that I think ideologically siloed White House budget officials can struggle to appreciate. Can DOL avoid hiccups that create more grief with so much new on its plate?
Can apprenticeship finally have its moment? And will it involve the end of ‘apprenticeability’ as we know it?
I’ll deal with the Trump Administration’s side of this separately because it’s more a political exercise than a substantive one at this stage. But it’s worth noting we’re on the fourth-straight administration that prioritizes apprenticeship, and the third out of four that prioritizes Registered Apprenticeship, the voluntary consumer-protection designation that is the primary way the federal government regulates American apprenticeship programs. Employers seem tired and increasingly skeptical of apprenticeship as an option for finding workers, even as they sour on college and complain about a shortage of skilled talent.
More than anything, apprenticeship needs easy buttons—ways of bringing apprenticeship programs to life that are quick and break up some of the stories employers tell about why apprenticeship can’t work for them. More needs to be done to ensure workers actually know about apprenticeship opportunities, too.
Neither of those necessarily require the involvement of Registered Apprenticeship, but as I have written before, Registered Apprenticeship could stand a regulatory streamlining to make it easier to use for everyone involved. If I had my druthers—and I frequently don’t—that would involve requiring living wages and adding other markers of quality to better signal that the best apprenticeship programs are registered.
For now, I have doubts that apprenticeship will get any regulatory remakes this election year, something Trump II already was wary of. Despite intimations at a hearing a couple months ago, I also doubt that the Senate can manage a new National Apprenticeship Act during an election year.
That said, I would not be surprised to see something to unwind the current concept of “apprenticeability,” a DOL requirement that effectively says apprenticeship programs can only be in occupations that are good fit for apprenticeship. I do have a deeper dive into that concept on my agenda in the coming weeks. In the meantime, it’s important to know that supporters view this requirement as proxy for quality control in apprenticeship. Republican lawmakers seem tilted against it because they view it as overriding local (and business) decisionmaking over how apprentices get trained.
Will the Trump Administration finally come up with a plan for the whole one million apprentices thing? Or will it turn to shenanigans—if any are available?
We’re nearly nine months removed from President Trump saying he wants one million active apprentices, and it’s unclear how that might happen. Heck, Administration officials and Senate allies have mistakenly said that an Administration document that says there isn’t yet a plan for getting to one million apprentices is the plan for reaching the goal. Even in the most consistency-challenged eras of the executive branch, that’s a really hard mistake to make.1
A plan is important because the Administration needs to do something to goose Registered Apprenticeship numbers to get to one million. It’s 300,000 apprentices away based on the most recent numbers and it won’t reach that figure until 2032 at the current rate of growth. Growth also appears to have dropped off in 2025, and there could be more dropoff big cuts of Biden infrastructure projects during the shutdown despite their pushing up apprenticeship totals. Even if the Administration were to make significant regulatory changes that make it easier to register apprentices, that doesn’t mean there will be a new influx of apprentices that will show up by 2028.
When businesses and political leaders have made similar pledges, I have heard of some ill-advised attempts to hit numbers by being pliable with the definition of “apprenticeship,” a not-that-pliable term that describes a very well-established type of training program and job. I think it would be hard for Trump II to do the same here. Even with notable inconsistencies in language, Trump officials have said enough to signal that the goal is one million registered apprentices. Backtracking will be difficult, and if it were to move the goal to one million new apprentices, that’s actually setting the bar lower than the Biden Administration’s performance in bringing in new apprentices.
It could broaden “apprentices” to include preapprenticeships, programs for youth and others that can be onramps to full apprenticeship programs. Yet, DOL doesn’t register preapprenticeship programs, making it hard to track what would count (and making what program DOL says count a bit perilous from quality standpoint). DOL also doesn’t appear to have replaced preapprenticeship guidance killed off without an announcement in the High DOGE Era, making that pathway harder to take.2
Will business and political leaders at least kinda try to fill their relatability gap with workers?
I’m going to say something as bluntly as possible because I think it’s the only way to make it land: a lot of America’s business and political leaders need to stop posturing about skills gaps and “college for all” and start talking to actual workers about why they’re not in skilled jobs that need to be filled. Workers aren’t shy about talking about the barriers, but leaders seem to stay cloistered away from workers even while they have a lot to say about all the well-paying jobs they can’t fill.
As I noted in my October conversation on reframing workforce programs with former colleague Rachel Lipson, I think leaders’ apathy on workforce is in part because they can’t relate to the barriers facing the working class due to wealth and very different life tracks. That leads to things like a mistaken, yet all-too-frequent assumption workers will be desperate enough to move into whatever careers that leaders want them to fill.
What will it take to get political leaders to really do something about childcare? Can New Mexico offer a blueprint for the future?
Speaking of the relatability gap, I think lawmakers in both parties—who tend to be wealthier and older—struggle with the relatability gap of working parents’ challenges in finding good, safe childcare. I spent quite a bit of time last year talking to truly concerned employers—including those in solidly red states—about how big of a challenge affordable childcare is for them in attracting and keeping talent. Yet, I don’t see any meaningful developments coming from Trump II, despite it wanting to avoid families being “under-babied.”
That’s why I’m intrigued by the universal childcare strategy put into effect by New Mexico at the end of 2025. Intentions aren’t execution, so there’s a long hike to making any new program a success. But if it works, New Mexico could be proof of concept for states making it easier for workers to get the childcare they need to fill jobs employers need filled.
What happens with workforce in a very complex political environment in New York?
New York’s become a hobby horse of mine in recent months. It’s really unlike any other environment in American workforce due to access to capital and the peculiarity of its needs as a state where employers can pretty easily recruit internationally. I have tended to think of New York’s workforce environment as incredibly closed off, but there are some interesting developments that could flavor the national workforce conversation in coming months and years.3
Obviously, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani inspires some big feelings among people who don’t live in New York. While his platform was ambitious on addressing affordability, it didn’t include clear plans for workforce development. How, and if, Mamdani fills that gap will be fascinating. Mamdani doesn’t seem to have the same reluctance to not ruffle feathers (especially of large corporations) that can bedevil national Democrats in coming up with workforce solutions, which could lead to some new ideas. I am excited that he hired my old boss, Julie Su, as a deputy mayor. I’ll be curious if her “high road” workforce development strategies show up in New York City.
Because of the big feelings, Republicans looking for a liberal messaging boogeyman want to closely tie Mamdani to Democrats outside of the City. That makes it interesting that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s recent public-facing materials have talked up the impact of his recent visits to upstate New York and how they will flavor Democrats’ national agenda. (Mamdani’s candidacy was not warmly regarded by key members of his state’s congressional delegation, as you might have heard.)
It’s also an election year for New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, and New York is one of the more paradoxical states in its workforce development setup. For example, New York has 250 percent of the population of Washington state, but 3,000 fewer registered apprentices. That’s odd for a program traditionally favored by the unions who have an outsized presence in New York, but New York’s registration process is widely regarded as one of the hardest to navigate. In 2024, former New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced the City had added 15,000 “apprenticeship opportunities”—in a state that currently reports 17,000 registered apprentices. Adams’ reputation is, of course, uh, layered, but it’s not impossible that a chunk of that number is made up of real apprenticeships not registered by the state.
Republicans have gone back and forth on whether they want to pull back on Biden-era semiconductor investments with significant workforce development ties. An awfully big one of those projects is in upstate New York, with construction recently pushed to the middle of this year.
Hello, valued customer.
Welcome back to your regularly scheduled JOBS THAT WORK. I have some exciting things planned as we near the first anniversary of the newsletter in the next few weeks, but first a few announcements:
I’m moving THE MONEY to Thursdays after enjoying the results of a holiday-necessitated move for the final two editions in December. National developments do tend to pop up late on Thursdays, so I’ll supplement as needed on Fridays for paid subscribers.
If you subscribed as a Founding Member, you get another free 45 minutes of my time after your subscription renews. I appreciate my founders’ support, and I’m thrilled to reconnect with all of you again.
The long-awaited Resources section will start leaking out n the next few weeks. The goal is to give readers what they need to better understand workforce in the United States and try new things. I’m looking forward to sharing some of what I have had cooking.
Card subject to change.
What might be lurking in Thursday’s edition of THE MONEY? Well, amid a few notable things in the news, the Hill has started sharing conferenced spending bills between the House and the Senate. The bill with much of federal workforce funding will be coming soon. It will be interesting to see if congressional Republicans choose the Senate’s status quo approach or the House’s burn-everything-down-while-crying-but-also-laughing strategy.
And not a great sign for how closely some Republicans read the Trump workforce blueprint.
I haven’t devoted enough time to describing just how strange it is that this guidance hasn’t been replaced. Preapprenticeship hasn’t explicitly been de-emphasized by Trump II, but it’s also not been a huge part of the conversation, either.
All due respect of course to my home state of Alabama, The Most Interesting State in Workforce in the Universe per most congressional hearings I listened to in 2025.