Big money for apprenticeship, a mushy Senate workforce block grant plan, and $7.3 billion in grants listings.
Plus, the AI apprenti-shift evidently continues, and Congress lurks.
JOBS THAT WORK: THE MONEY is a weekly rundown of the news and grant listings important for people who use money to get people to work, with exclusive intel and insights for paid subscribers. It’s brought to you by
Streamline’s AI-powered Discover platform helps organizations find grants that fit their work more easily and helps them reduce the time it takes to apply. I used Streamline to help put together listings for my paid subscribers—it’s a great tool that makes the hard work of finding grants much easier. Streamline helps organizations save 50 percent to 80 percent of their time to draft grant applications.
You can learn more about Discover here and request a demo here.
Programming note.
I’ll have an extra paid newsletter tomorrow on some funding oddness I have spotted. There’s quite a bit to get to today, as you’ll see.
Behind today’s paywall.
Trump II spends big on apprenticeship—and says the quiet part out loud.
The continued shift from “AI apprenticeships” to “AI infrastructure apprenticeships”—and another shift on top of that.
Where things stand on federal workforce funding cuts.
Toplines.
News you should know about money and things getting people to work.
A sloppy congressional attempt to mush workforce into block grants. Kinda.
On Tuesday, Republican Sen. John Husted of Ohio introduced a bill that would allow five states to start pilots blending together nine federal entitlement programs—including food and housing assistance—with annual allotments of one steady source of federal workforce funding (sort of). The pilot would be run by the Administration for Children and Families at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Husted’s team frames this bill as implementing Utah-style strategies to workforce and entitlements to reduce the impacts of benefits cliffs. Republican Rep. Blake Moore of Utah introduced a corresponding bill in the House.
This is a 40-plus page bill, and it’s hard to pull this kind of legislation together. Constructively, though, this is a sloppy effort that feels like it has a tenuous hold on the problems it says it is solving—and one that has an uphill political battle.
It also seems symptomatic of how Republicans seem to be struggling to come up with new ideas that meet this key moment in jobs policy. It’s mostly been the same playlist of rearranging the furniture of the workforce bureaucracy (but not the expensive parts based on outdated thinking in the House), moving to block grants for block grants’ sake, and paying employers—but not too much—to train workers. That makes it all the more interesting some Democratic lawmakers remain focused on bipartisan workforce measures largely defined by the GOP.
It’s a little important to know what money you’re trying to mush into a block grant.
Since taking over Vice President J.D. Vance’s seat, Husted has been trying to claw out space as a key thinker on workforce in the Senate. Respectfully, if he wants to stay on that path, he and his team might want to show they know the dollars and structures. This bill… doesn’t do that.
As pitched, this bill would add to its pilot block grant mush one of the four steady, state-allotted source of federal workforce funding: the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act’s Dislocated Worker Formula Program. Off the bat, I think the DW program is an odd choice for an entitlement reduction pilot. For example, it’s one of the primary sources of funding for states in responding to mass layoffs. Accordingly, this bill proposes merging a program that could keep unemployed workers off entitlements altogether to… help workers get off entitlements.
Yet, as a matter of mechanics and care, the bill actually doesn’t do that. In identifying the program to be merged, the bill incorrectly cites portions of WIOA that aren’t the DW funds but an administrative provision. Specifically, it describes harnessing money at 29 U.S.C. 3171(b)(2)(B), a provision that doesn’t have a paragraph (b)—or a paragraph (a), for that matter. I suspect the intention was 29 U.S.C. 3172, which describes the DW program. It looks like a typo, and, uh, one you don’t want to make here.
That’s not the worst mistake, though. The bill then says it would route the pilot states’ annual allotments of a program that isn’t the DW program—or one with annual allotment. Specifically, the bill says it would stir in states’ dollars from the National Dislocated Worker Grants program. DOL awards these dollars to on an as-needed basis to states that apply for them after significant job loss events, including natural disasters and pandemics. In other words, it’s not the program that Husted’s team intended to draft into the block grant at all.
This reads like a word search gone wrong involving someone who doesn’t fully know these programs. The name “National Dislocated Worker Grants” is confusing, and this portion of workforce funding used to be called “National Emergency Grants” until Congress changed it in WIOA. That said, I did a lot of the work helping build out the administrative structure of the National Dislocated Worker Grant Program. The section of law cited, while not exactly written at a first-grade level, is pretty clear not the DW program, even to a layman.
Off the cliff.
Husted’s team premises this bill on reducing the challenges of “benefits cliffs,” situations where a recipient of government funding starts making too much money to stay within the income-eligibility requirements of federal help they still need to get by.
First, Congress really doesn’t need to start a pilot program run by states to do that. It could simply raise the income restrictions so that more workers can get the help they need until they reach self-sufficiency.
Second, if the goal is to make things more like “Utah” to fix benefits cliffs, my understanding is that actual Utah also struggles with benefit cliffs due to income eligibility requirements that Congress can soften.
As a refresher, Utah, through a quirk of federal law, can immediately assess workers full needs—not just training but also things like childcare that can keep them out of training—and direct them to programs. That’s not this bill—or really, the idea that well-funded conservative groups have sold GOP states and lawmakers on the “Utah” way of doing business on workforce and entitlements.
I don’t think this bill has political legs. But neither do the Trump block grants, apparently.
The Trump Administration has explicitly pushed blobbing together all of workforce (and much of the Department of Education) into DOL. This aspires to move decisionmaking on a key DOL funding program to HHS. I think that will tilt the Administration against this bill.
Husted also would need support from seven Democrats to clear the Senate. This is the absolute wrong time to make this pitch due to the Ed-DOL marriage, which has had a rocky start.
Even if this doesn’t have a future, I do think it’s telling that we haven’t yet really seen a bill that resembles either the August Trump workforce blueprint’s blob grant plan or the cut-heavy “Make America Skilled Again” block grants put forward by the White House last spring.
I don’t think the Administration has done a ton of work selling those ideas to lawmakers—or if it will with this Congress. The White House very transparently is trying to batten down the hatches with its Republican allies on the Hill in hopes of avoiding the House flipping to Democrats who will pursue another impeachment. Trump also acknowledged to congressional Republicans this week that his agenda—which as you might have noticed has involved cutting the holy hell out of everything—isn’t resonating with voters.
I won’t say those approaches are dead, but it’s an election year, and the people who would seem willing to bite on that type of thing just aren’t biting.
This week’s grant listings number: $7.3 billion.
A lot of deadlines coming up in the next two weeks.