Fixing workforce at the worst possible time.

The awkward place of having momentum to change the lives of American workers and employers, and the wrong decisionmakers.

The issue

Now is the best time to fix a lot of the overcomplicated and underperforming American workforce system. It’s also the worst time to do it because the people steering policy don’t understand the need for these programs—and have no interest in learning.

Explain.

Last week, I was at Jobs for the Future’s Horizons conference, the San Diego Comic-Con for workforce development folk. With what felt like 500 percent of the workforce universe present—and my conversations covering about 300 percent—I’ve been reflecting on what I saw, heard, and learned.¹

What I took away the most was this: a lot of that workforce universe is very open to change after the mass termination of grant dollars and proposed destruction of federally supported workforce programs.

This is probably the most immediately hungry I have seen this crowd for something different and better. The systems we have now aren’t good at doing things like “Not overwhelming users” and “Paying for workers to have food and place to live while they get training.” Unsurprisingly, there are plenty of people who think they haven’t justified their existence in their current form.²

In turn, I think there is openness to the Trump Administration’s block grant proposal if it means jumping through fewer hoops to spend money on workers. Creating processes that are straight lines, not squiggles, would be incredibly helpful, and I think that is a bipartisan belief with more momentum than I might have expected before last week.

The good news is that this could be an easy political pitch to hit for America’s policymakers. The bad news? Congress and the Trump Administration seem more interested in soaking their bat in gasoline and using it as a torch to burn down the ballfield.

Friends, I think that means they don’t want to hit the ball.

I mean this constructively, but it’s lazier policymaking than the status quo to just cut programs instead of trying to get more out of the money and infrastructure. In my experience, this move also tends to speak more to the proposed cutter’s lack of confidence in their ability to fund or build them in ways that they’re willing to be accountable for later. After reading budget proposals that say that some programs are good but not good enough, I think it’s fair to ask if that’s one of the drivers here.

The Trump Administration, at the agency level, does appear to be trying to extend olive branches. As you can tell from last week’s edition of Paul Fain’s excellent The Job newsletter, the Trump appointees who visited Horizons—some of whom I think quite highly of—encouraged collaboration and promised policies that will make many people happy in workforce world. I have heard of similar efforts to assuage nerves behind closed doors at multiple agencies.

But it’s Trump White House officials running their ballbat torch to every workforce program they can find. Unlike some of their agency counterparts, I have heard enough that indicates these leaders—with whom many organizations will never get an audience—are embarrassingly underinformed about what these programs do and the people they serve. They don’t seem terribly interested in finding out, and they’re not as suggestible as some folks think.³

There may be room for suggestion with Congress, but there also is room to be concerned. While some crowds hopped up on Abundance⁴ want to lean on Democrats for the system’s current problems, some awfully loud Republican voices helped shape the most burdensome parts of the system like its “accountab[ility]” measures.

As I wrote on Friday, those folks are still in Congress and will play a big role in shaping what’s next. There is a decent chance that Congress fails to install the flexibility that makes block grants so appealing. Which is bad.

What should we do about it?

A lot of things. I’m going to spend a good chunk of the summer and fall ticking through the many exits along the road between the status quo and killing all the programs for an also-cut block grant program. In the meantime, I do have a few pieces of policy advice on the current state of play.

If I was the Trump Administration and I wanted to bring workforce organizations to my side: show, don’t tell. You can’t policy your way out of the hole the White House has dug for you, and you kind of need money to back up those policies. Your budget proposals, if adopted, will make that real, real hard. There is a big bipartisan (and brandable) win here if you can get the White House to listen.

If I was a workforce practitioner, there is some legitimate energy toward getting things fixed, and a slim opportunity to do it, even if it’s not perfect. Once The Voluminous William Is a Beaut Act gets through the Senate (current deadline(?) is early July), there is a short window where I expect most of the changes to American workforce will get negotiated, with a long pause in the middle for the August recess. I would bring your boldest changes to policymakers and keep two things in mind.

Be honest and direct with current policymakers—yes, even these ones.

There is a particularly frustrating genre of politico who will tell [X] organization that while their opinion is great, that politico will only listen to [Y] organization, and [X] group really needs to go campaign to [Y] group to tell that same politico the policy [X] organization wants.⁵ It’s all the more frustrating to hear about these interactions when you know that [Y] organization wants the same damn thing. They just told you, not the politico.

While I will not rule out the possibility that type of politico ignored, forgot, or didn’t process the clear policy asks of [Y] organization, there also are a lot of kid gloves right now with current leadership because of all the grant terminations over the winter and spring. I understand it, but if you’re already having to bend yourself in 80 different ways to try to accommodate the current administration, you’re in deep trouble, and trying to twist what you want into their shape won’t help. If they have more cuts to make and an angry White House dude on the phone, they really won’t care.

Softening the message also may backfire on you if you’re assuming they know what the program does. I have been in meeting rooms where political leaders learned very basic facts about programs and backed away from massive changes because they didn’t want to own them. (You should use that to your advantage, by the way.)

This isn’t most stakeholders’ play in political settings, but it’s necessary right now if you get an audience. The conversations between the Administration and the Hill are about eliminating funding lines that keep many workforce organizations operating, able to take care of workers, and get employers the talent they need to thrive. There is no savvy political play in holding onto your cards because there is a decent chance you’re about to lose the hand that holds them.

Bring clear evidence, make direct asks, and do not sugarcoat anything.

Don’t hold onto a bad status quo because it’s safe.

There isn’t much use pretending there aren’t problems in how we fund and deliver workforce training in the United States. The system can work better for quite a few people—including those who run workforce organizations. The encouraging thing is that the apocalypse of this current system has opened up more possibilities about what comes next.

The disappointing thing is that a one-size-fits-all block grant system—paired with massive budget cuts and potentially hefty administrative costs—is the only solution that current political leaders seems to have in mind.

I still think lawmakers like little changes that can have big impacts; however, I would recommend talking up how extraordinary—nay, revolutionary—these changes might be.

People are hungry for change, as ill-timed as it is. The bigger and bolder you can make it—even if it’s awfully practical in the end—the better your ideas will be taken.

Card subject to change.

In re-reading for my last edit, I have concluded this is my most 1990s/2000s sports columnist newsletter. #iykyk Consider this edition a tee up for the rest of a potentially real consequential summer for workforce. (Also, Joe Flacco isn’t elite.)

FRIDAY: Offering a timeline on when changes might happen to federal workforce spending, reacting to the DOL Solicitor confirmation hearing, and bringing in whatever hilarity occurs between now and Friday.

NEXT TUESDAY: Utah’s “one-door” model and why I think it’s a bit oversold.

1. To avoid getting anyone in trouble, this isn’t based on a conversation with one person or group. It’s more a reflection of where I find my head a few days later after processing everything I have seen and heard.

2. I need time to process what this means but I may have been too optimistic last week in describing how much employers and workforce providers have soured on apprenticeship. There seems to be skepticism about whether apprenticeship—not Registered Apprenticeship, mind you—truly is a good way of training someone. In some situations, I think this is backlash to years of overindexing apprenticeship, but it’s worth taking note of. I don’t think that skepticism will reach the Hill anytime soon, or at least enough to move Congress away from its stock belief that college is bad and apprenticeship is the future.

3. There is siloed thinking everywhere in politics, but having spent quite a bit of the past two decades with the far right, the flavor currently driving policy in the White House really struggles with changed circumstances and conflicting information.

That ain’t great! I admire the hell out of people who are trying to find a bright side in all this, but the Administration probably won’t back up those hopes.

4. I finally read this book over the weekend, and I suspect I’ll have thoughts down the line, but my short review is I didn’t hate it. If this leads to better policymaking in less Big Dumb Bureaucracy that makes it hard for people to get a job or something to eat, I’m all for it. (I’m much less concerned about the buildings and IT systems that draw concern in some of these conversations.)

It’s also probably not great that some political leaders needed a book from a shiny elite to consider “Do stuff that works and is manageable” as a policy solution!

5. If you’re the type of young political staffer who says this sort of thing out loud, you’re politicking wrong. I have seen The Professionals deliver this same message in far more subtle and effective ways that don’t burn potentially useful bridges by being a jerk.

Also, you might want to start scouting law schools now. It can be very competitive.