Holding up new workforce cash, handing the keys to employers, and $1.2 billion in grants listings.
Plus: a Trump budget and the missing pieces in Congress' student aid redo.
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Hello
Greetings from D.C., where I hope you enjoyed Wednesday’s Apprenticeship Christmas, if you observe. There really is nothing like the Youth Apprenticeships leaving their standards under the Apprenticeability Bush to see if St. Competency left them a progressive wage.
(I appreciate all two of you who laughed at this bit.)
Toplines
News you should know affecting money that gets people to work.
FYSA: The Trump budget is out today. Also the jobs report.
I suspect the budget will provide us clues to where the expected workforce cuts could happen, but the Administration has done so much without congressional approval that I don’t know how to value it. In term one, the budget was a good spot for satisfying White House bugaboos toward particular programs that were too politically sturdy for Congress to cut. Lord knows what that would be now (and hopefully Head Start fits in the “Congress won’t touch” bucket).
I’m curious about the sequencing of this budget with this morning’s jobs report, which I’ll preview as follows: 🤷♂️.
The fed layoffs remain herky-jerky in execution, but the numbers are too dramatic not to make an impact eventually—it just may not be this month. That said, GDP and private payrolls turned out rough. I can’t imagine it will be fun to debut a chop-forward budget juxtaposed against another bad economic report. I also can’t imagine the White House didn’t think of that when they scheduled the budget for Jobs Day.
If anything super notable happens, I’ll be back with a video or two.
Congress: Sending fewer people to higher education.
That’s how I would sum up much of the smart analysis I have read of the House majority’s proposed changes to student aid. The changes cap federal student loan borrowing to $50,000 for most students, eliminate deferment for unemployment, and raise the number of hours per year needed to access (the already meager) Pell grants for higher education. There are finally short-term Pell grants for workforce programs, but this bill is undercooked in ways that I don’t think it’s particularly helpful to have it as the vehicle for getting access to that tool, long-sought by workforce programs.
In context, it’s also hard not to read this as discouraging more people away from college. This year, the Hill’s prevailing narrative has been that too many people try to go to college and getting away from that will fix most of what’s going on with workforce. There isn’t a corresponding workforce bill yet, but I would expect this narrative to drive that conversation too.
How prevalent is the narrative? A few weeks ago, I used a large-language model to analyze the first three hearings of the year that speak to the Hill’s current thinking on workforce development: Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Deputy Secretary Keith Sonderling’s confirmation hearings and a hearing on the future of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, America’s main vein of workforce development dollars. Non-college routes to careers came up 13 times.
Yet, for all that rhetorical real estate, few of the comments and questions had more depth than what Ohio Sen. John Husted said here:
A lot of jobs today we are saying you need a college degree for, but really you could just apprentice that job and credential that job and it might not need a college degree.
There really isn’t that much thinking on how you make sure this transition happens—and it shows in my read and reread of the student aid bill. This process piece is a mess and key terms are undefined. I know what a “stackable” and “portable” credential is, but not everyone does. If you’re wiring those terms to something as essential to Pell, as the bill does, it’s shocking that Congress isn’t defining them so there’s no confusion.
The Administration is shrinking the ranks of federal experts that gap-filled for Congress in the past, which previously allowed the Hill the luxury to punt the “How?” piece. Congress doesn’t have that luxury anymore, and unfortunately, it’s remaking a big chunk of education and the economy as if it still does.
This week’s grant listing number: $1.2 billion.
Not going to lie, it feels like it’s getting a little sparse around here. I felt like we published approximately 700 grants in April when I was at DOL this time last year. This year, it’s been much quieter.
More on why that might be below.
Behind the paywall
A big potential shift in employers’ role in workforce programs.
Will the Administration sit on grant programs until it clears up its workforce plans?
Grant Anxiety updates.