Job Corps by Harvard? Retreat on block grants? And $1.9 billion in grants listings.
Unpacking the Trump workforce blueprint and its proposed big blob of workforce money.
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News you should know about the money that gets people to work.
Countdown.
We’re 47 days from the end of the fiscal year. More than $260 million in workforce grant dollars haven’t yet been announced or opened to competition. All these dollars appear to expire on September 30.
One of the mining grants came off the board this week. More behind the paywall.
The Trump Administration workforce blueprint is out.
On Tuesday, the Trump Administration finally published its plan for how the Departments of Labor, Commerce, and Education are going to fix America’s workforce programs to the White House’s liking. “Blob grant” is a good description of what it has in mind.
I have what might be a surprising takeaway from the blueprint that I will unpack in a special newsletter next week. Today, I’m catching you up on political signals in this plan as well as how this probably will manifest in funding in the near term.
To start off, here’s an overview of the high points of this plan:
I have a lot of criticisms of the plan. That said, it is worth noting the plan includes a few things I have called for here at JOBS THAT WORK, like doubling down on apprenticeship in the face of funding cuts, developing off-the-shelf versions of apprenticeship to improve registration, and tying workforce funding to actual real-life job opportunities and placements.
The status quo’s lead over the Trump block grant.
It was inevitable that the plan was going to say that the answer to all problems was the Trump Administration’s proposal to toss out most workforce programs and replace them with a block grant. The new blueprint expands that to replacing all of the Departments of Commerce, Education, and Labor’s workforce programs with a megablock grant—or blob grant, if you will—operated out of DOL.
Even with that ill-concealed cat out of the bag, there are signs this week that the Administration is easing up on how particular it is that this plan has to happen as written—or as much as it’s capable of easing up. It also signaled it’s willing to take a much more productive exit ramp that likely will earn bipartisan support in Congress.
To level set a little, the President called for this blueprint in an April 23 executive order that told the three departments to produce an accounting of “ineffective” workforce programs and plans to reform or eliminate. The President’s budget request a few weeks later called for the elimination of almost all current programs and replacing them with a block grant. It stood to reason that this plan would include a Trumpian takedown of each program.
Since then, Senate appropriators have advanced a bill that would reject this plan by reupping the existing workforce programs and restoring many of them to 2024 funding levels. House Republicans have indicated the plan might be unpassable in that chamber as proposed. Blessedly, the Trumpian “takedown” of good programs and good grantees is not in this week’s plan. It includes the minimum amount of takedown-type content to meet the executive order, with brief blurbs renewing calls to end three workforce programs.
But the blob grant plan kind of needed that takedown-like material. The blueprint doesn’t really answer the political or evidentiary question of why much of what little federal money is spent now on workforce—and the trades-flavored training it pays for—needs to go away in an Administration that wants to get people into the trades.
The authors may disagree with that. They’re free to—some of them are very smart cookies—and disagreement is healthy. And I have been in their shoes.
Strip out the Trump flourishes, though, and this blueprint is pretty much every thinktank report I have read about workforce in the past three years. Those tended not to call for blob grants. Heck, this could have been a report I would have edited for Biden leaders arguing for good jobs a year ago, right down to the callout against “train and pray.”
Double heck, this report in parts seems to argue against a block grant by pushing for tight federal control of funding that doesn’t line up with the core concept of a block grant.
Let’s be clear: the White House isn’t backing way from block grants. With what’s happening on the Hill, though, there are flashes that we’re going to get “simulated” block grants via the statutory status quo. More on what that could look like behind the paywall.
What flashes? For one, there is this line talking about last week’s new $30 million DOL grant for loose state workforce funds reimbursing employers, in a press release published the day before this week’s new workforce plan:
This fund also echoes the President’s proposal to Make America Skilled Again, which aims to provide states with the resources and flexibility needed to meet their unique workforce demands.
Block grants are a mindset, a drop of water in a pond rippling forever toward industry-driven training outcomes…
For another, there is this from the workforce blueprint itself:
Flexible funding models like [the Make America Skilled Again block grants] can empower governors to direct workforce investments toward business needs and eliminate duplicative or siloed efforts. . . . The Administration will work with Congress to implement the MASA proposal described in the President’s FY 2026 Budget . . . through WIOA reauthorization or through FY 2026 appropriations provisions.
That little bit of waffling about this year’s appropriations process makes me wonder whether anything approaching this plan will show up in the House’s spending bill for DOL and Education. I’m never going to doubt the Trump Administration’s brute strength in getting something it wants through this Congress. Yet, if block/blob grants come down to anything labeled “WIOA reauthorization,” I have my doubts that what comes out will look like the block grant proposed by this blueprint or the President’s budget.
Based on their last try at reauthorizing WIOA, the vision many congressional Republicans have for the workforce system is a small deviation from what we have now. Many Republicans want that bill back, even if it unfortunately continues the unnecessarily costly and really annoying bureaucratic parts of WIOA.
Since the White House’s proposal, what I have heard strong support for—across the partisan spectrum—is merging together the existing WIOA formula programs into a block grant that preserves most of the programs the Administration would do with away with. WIOA requires formula money be divided and boxed away in the aforementioned annoyingly bureaucratic ways. To that end, the blueprint notes:
To enable states to further streamline programs, the Administration will work with Congress on a legislative proposal to establish an authority for states, similar to the P.L.102-477 authority for Tribes and the flexibility already available to territories, to allow for the consolidation of disparate workforce funding[.]
Even paired with a modest funding cut, I could see this block grant idea easily clearing the filibuster threshold in the Senate. The question is would that victory—which would be a hell of a Trump legacy point, by the way—be enough?
Unfortunately, I don’t think it will be. More on the plan behind the paywall.
This week’s grants listings number: $1.9 billion.
New private money, a Housing and Urban Development grant, and more.
Behind the paywall.
Job Corps, brought to you by Harvard?
Cutting out nonprofits and workforce boards to simulate block grants.
The Administration says it’s going to punish workforce grantees and do stuff with money it can’t for legal and logistical reasons. Again.