Congress doesn't break workforce funding, apprenticeship weirdness (again), and $7.3 billion in grants listings.
Plus, the latest on the Labor Secretary scandal.
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Behind today’s paywall.
Updates on the Labor Secretary scandal and Republican concerns about the allegations.
The apprenticeship delay you shouldn’t worry about.
The apprenticeship delay you maybe should worry about.
Greetings from Washington.
Where I’ll be around National Skills Coalition’s Skills Summit today and tomorrow. If you see me, feel free to say “Hey”—and “Why are you wearing a Batman mask?” (If applicable.)
Toplines.
News you should know about money and things getting people to work.
The federal workforce funding apocalypses are over—until, like, probably June. Maybe.
Lost in the everything of this week’s brief shutdown was that the bill signed by the President on Wednesday ended a saga that started last May, when the Trump White House proposed killing most of the federal government’s workforce programs and replacing them with a much smaller block grant program.
The bill doesn’t enact that proposal or a later block grant plan developed by Trump agency appointees. Workforce funding will return to pretty much the same levels they were two years ago. No major programs were eliminated, despite House Republicans proposing to halve the Department of Labor’s programs and calling them “nice to have” as hiring cools amid a potentially massive reorganization of the labor market. The bill preserves programs that Trump II—especially DOGE—had made a point to go after, like Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations grant program. In the case of Job Corps, the bill pretty much locks in place that program as presently constructed and located.
There’s some real good and bad in that. To get the bad out of the way: as I have written quite a bit lately, I think the endless continuation of these programs and their funding show how poorly invested lawmakers are in packet of issues that affect nearly every American in some way. There’s a real conversation to be had here about what could be done about that in an election year and what that would look like, the latter being an extremely key question given how much of the workforce space is populated by nonprofits who aren’t supposed to wade into electoral waters. That said, I’ll be curious to see if anyone starts to have it after last week’s special election in Red-as-Hell Texas involved campaigning hard on workforce and labor issues that the Democratic establishment doesn’t seem ready to embrace.
The other bad news is that I don’t think there’s much in the way of effective protections against the Trump Administration stopping paying out grants, as it did in the first months of Trump II. Not everyone agrees with me on this point, but having been down in the muck of sorting what an appropriation really says you can and cannot do, there’s not a lot of firm “cannot” in the bill that passed. A little glimmer here: all things considered, DOL workforce dollars have been largely preserved by Trump II. (Of course, the Department of Education funding is another matter entirely.)
The good news is that, even if White House budget officials continue to war on these dollars, it would be a surprise to see significant cuts to these dollars before the next Congress is seated in January 2027. As long as the central architects of this administration are employed, I think workforce programs are in danger—and you should absolutely expect them to re-up last year’s proposed cuts in a few months.
That said, Trump himself seems worried about how voters are metabolizing his domestic agenda, heavy on knives to key federal programs. Voter turnabout on immigration enforcement after the Alex Pretti shooting seems to have them legitimately spooked in ways I never expected out of a Trump team. There’s also Venezuela, Iran, Ukraine, and, for some reason, Greenland. Workforce isn’t an area that might get a ton of attention.
Your wild card, of course, is apprenticeship. I don’t know how much psychic damage the White House will suffer by not meeting the one million apprentices goal. There’s a strong assumption—on both sides of the aisle—that one million will not happen in this administration. If it becomes really obvious that assumption is our current reality, how will the Trump White House react—or will it react?
This week’s grant listings number: $7.3 billion.
Stable number, but plenty of new additions. Maryland apprenticeship incentives! AmeriCorps! New Jersey!