House Republicans' plan to cut American workforce funding in half.
What programs would go away, what programs get more money, and what I think happens next.
On Tuesday, a subcommittee of House appropriators approved advancing a proposal to halve funding for America’s workforce programs.
The funding bill would eliminate two of the four main arteries of funding for workforce in the United States and kill thousands of jobs for reasons mostly lacking a rational explanation—or any explanation—by appropriators. It also would chop the Job Corps program’s funding in half, but in a way that likely would make it harder to serve as many students or train them well.
This bill is close to the inverse of a proposal cleared by Senate appropriators in July, which maintained and restored funding recently cut for some of these programs. In some ways, this is a more extreme cut-up of workforce than the Trump Administration’s plan to cut all of these programs and replace them with a block grant. Its cuts to workforce training for youth are out of alignment with the Administration’s workforce goals, which call for using this money to train young people in AI.
Appropriators didn’t give a meaningful (or non-laughable) justification for these cuts. At markup, the closest I think we got for an explanation for the funding cut by the bill—which also would eliminate teacher jobs and AIDS research—was boilerplate about Americans’ personal finances and an assertion that these investments were “nice to have,” per Rep. Robert Aderholt, R-Ala, the chair of the House appropriations subcommittee that built the bill.
I struggle to see this overcoming the filibuster in the Senate, and in July Aderholt signaled his worry this bill might not clear the House. I’m not alone in questioning its chances of passing. In markup on Tuesday, Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., called it “fantasy Congress” and mocked the bill’s proposal to rename the new Workforce Pell grants into “Trump Grants.”
But maintaining some of this funding requires Republican members fight publicly for the programs they marshal behind the scenes. I don’t think you can count on that, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this ends with something significant in workforce going away because it may be easier to give up in a negotiation than teacher jobs. So even if this particular build doesn’t make it, I would take this much more seriously than the lawmakers who crafted it seem to.
Below, I unpack many of the cuts piece by piece and situate them among the other gigantic changes to workforce funding proposed by the Trump Administration.
Behind the paywall
Program-by-program funding comparisons.
House Republicans’ vision for much of America’s adult workforce funding taking a year off, backpacking in Europe, learning how to bake…
What happens to Job Corps—and why it’s worse than it looks.