Firing everybody, $56 million from… somewhere, and $52 billion in grants listings.
Plus, SCSEP gets unfrozen, H-1B's workforce funding impact, and closing the loop on that five-day competition.
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Toplines
News you should know about the money that gets people to work.
Big dumb shutdown stuff.
So yeah, the government shut down on Wednesday morning. The effects on workforce could be significant.
For one, $8 billion in grant projects are now gone in Democratic-voting states. In addition to creating jobs, the dollars cut on Wednesday also incentivized things like Registered Apprenticeship, which the Administration aims to get from around 700,000 active apprentices to one million active apprentices. Current DOL figures—and numbers bragged about in a White House release—suggest the Administration already is behind. This won’t help. Especially since there are layoffs already caused by these kinds of rollbacks elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the White House is threatening mass layoffs of federal staff, during the same week that 154,000 feds finally left their jobs as part of the deferred resignation program, which has been scaled back by an unknown amount as the Administration’s work buckled under staffing issues at some agencies. Adding that many unemployed workers at once isn’t a good thing. The job data we’ve gotten this week look bad, although it may be longer yet until we see the full impact on the labor market—and not just because we have no clue what the labor market looks like due to withholding of today’s jobs report.
The good news is that exiting feds continued to accrue leave that will be paid out with their final checks. I’m fairly certain many of the more-tenured feds had an impressive amount of leave and most likely accrued it in bigger chunks. Given that the deferred-resignation feds weren’t using vacation time while they were getting paid to stay home, conceivably some of those folks may not show up on unemployment until the New Year.
Even still, the White House’s mass layoff threats could dull any planning done to spread out the pain of previous federal job cuts, which totaled around 300,000 heading into the shutdown. There seems to be a White House belief that the President apparent enthusiasm for firing thousands more people will work out in his favor, politically.
Or to sum all this up, neither the math nor the politics add up right now. Workforce funding continues to dwindle even as the need for it grows due to staff cuts initiated by the Administration, and the Trump workforce ambitions seem further out of reach because of choices it doesn’t have to make.
This week’s grants listings number: $52 billion.
A new HUD grant and a new private listing. Otherwise, holding steady due to rolling money and health money for states.
Behind the paywall.
A surprise $56 million in workforce funding.
SCSEP is finally free… kinda.
The good news/bad news of higher H-1B fees.