Lawmakers love the ‘social alchemy’ of workforce programs. Why don't they like the people the programs actually help?

Where happy political narratives supporting workforce development cause bad policy.

The idea

Congress likes the idea of helping workers much more than the workers it actually needs to help. It’s a significant crack in the foundation of workforce development in the United States.

Wait, what?

In June 2017, early in the first Trump Administration, Rep. Virginia Foxx called a hearing of the House Education and Workforce Committee on the safety of students in the Job Corps program. She had a point she wanted to make. She didn’t get to make it.

Job Corps is the largest residential training program in the country. It serves low-income youth, young people who are homeless, and young people who are victims of human trafficking, including other populations that face quite a few challenges getting an education and a job. It is a predominantly Black group of students, but one that still captures an extraordinarily diverse cross-section of the young people left behind by American society.

It also tends to face the problems that afflict lower-income communities. About a decade ago it had two on-center murders and justifiable oversight in the aftermath. For brevity, I summarize in the footnotes below.¹ This increased scrutiny of a program already a soft target for certain parts of the Hill—because Job Corps is taxpayer dollars being spent upon this particular population, that makes it great hay for a certain type of political oversight.

Based on the video above, I think you can infer that Foxx wanted to show that Job Corps helped more than it hurt. Her colleagues disagreed. Stories were shared. Members talked about how they had enjoyed their experiences at Job Corps centers. Momentum shifted behind the story that Congress funds something that miraculously transforms young lives.

I was in the back of the hearing room in my official role as “agency lawyer who lurks.” The video above does not capture the drastic shift of energy in the room.

Nor did the cameras adequately capture how enormously pissed this shift appeared to make Virginia Foxx. “Many of my colleagues have talked about why we need Job Corps,” she said at the start of her closing statement, with an intonation that, as a fellow Southerner, I categorize as “Not even Jesus could make this lady at church talk to you again.”²

She shifted into well-worn and comfortable conservative talking points about “society” and the degradation thereof. But near the end, she said something I think about when I run into the uncomfortable issue of who workforce programs are really for.

“What we’re doing is continuing to put Band-Aids on the larger culture,” Foxx said, “and that is very troubling to me [that] we don’t look at what creates the need for Job Corps.”

I grew up in rural Alabama largely living off my Dad’s death benefits from Social Security and the Tennessee Valley Authority. I had friends growing up who did shocking and desperate things to escape bad domestic situations rooted in generational poverty and lack of access to behavioral health. I spent big parts of my twenties reporting on poverty and crime and the ways they stem from broken state and local economies in the Deep South.

So when I heard Foxx say that, my brain had a thought so immediate, so bright and intense, that I thought it would appear above me, incandescent and neon, in a whiff of ozone and pure exasperation and break my lawyerly anonymity:

Explain yourself.

To an extent, Virginia’s ending soliloquy is right. Many lawmakers are in love with the idea of programs like Job Corps³ for reasons that are deeply superficial. At some point early in my time at DOL, I nicknamed this political and policy thinking as “social alchemy”: a rough material in the form of a poor person goes into the system, some measure of magic and hand-waving happens that lawmakers need not worry about, economic gold in the shape of a Citizen with a Job comes out.

An original sin of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act is that it is steeped in that impractical logic of social alchemy, which presupposes some basic financial education, a little bit of training, and a job—not a necessarily a good job, mind you—is the fix for everyone afflicted with anything.

Here is a mildly exaggerated view of the person whom, after a decade of time with WIOA and various oversight inquiries about its administration, appears to be its intended beneficiary:

They just need a little training.

Their life has been tough, but they do the best they can and they don’t stray from the path of clean living and good intentions any more than you and me.

They just got a bad lot. Once they get this commercial driver’s license they will find a job right away, move to the suburbs, and become an even better person than they already were when they didn’t have money.

They definitely have never used drugs. They have children but even the tongue-clicking-est church biddy would find nothing objectionable about their love life or other life choices.

They will cost as little money as possible to the American taxpayer.

I won’t belabor the point by running down all the ways that doesn’t describe some WIOA participants. Nor should it have to.

One of the things I always loved about Job Corps is that by its design, it takes away the magic hand-waving stage of the social alchemy narrative. Instead of leaving people to find their ends in places we never have to look, it brings young people and their problems into the federal government’s view and forces it to try to help them out.

It’s also why I think there are political leaders who dislike Job Corps or want to make the challenges faced by its students a “Job Corps problem.”

Like I said above, there is a particular type of political hay to be made here for those doing legislative oversight, and much of it has to do with perpetuating ideas of race and class as well as looking for lurid ideas to put the phrase, “Can you believe your federal government pays for this?” When Hill staff ask outright for negative statistics on young Black men, and only young Black men, that is kind of hard to deny.

There are other oversight encounters that in retrospect I think speak to something else. “Why don’t you let the good people into Job Corps?” is definitely racist as all get out, but to me, it all speaks to a desperation to cling to that idea of social alchemy. We meant these programs for good people, you see. Why do you keep letting in all the bad?

Please don’t think I’m being charitable because I most certainly am not. You can’t make good policy unless you’re willing to engage what the problem actually is. Trying to avoid real people who have real problems in the real world is a silly and destructive thing to do if you’re designing workforce policy.

Congress doesn’t spend too much money on these programs, and the politics around who these programs serve and who they are meant to serve have downstream consequences on how they are administered. As I have said before, there are providers who do amazing work and hold the line to take care of their people. There also are those who buckle under the pressure of the employers and political leaders whose influence is built into these systems by design.

By trying to shove people into a box that meets the vision of The Good Poor Person, you force people to self-select or cause them to be unknowingly sorted out of getting federal help for not looking like the person who gets help. If you’re a lawmaker, it also eventually makes it not your problem to fix, which if you‘ve tracked Job Corps’ flat funding the last decade, well, it’s hard to say the Hill doesn’t think that.⁴

What I will say, though, is that I think that the federal workforce system as a whole is better at handling these issues than it was eight years ago. Once far-off ideas for providing needed services are closer to the norm. I was heartened a couple years ago to hear that DOL’s opioid grants, a baby of mine from the first Trump Administration, helped open opportunities to use workforce dollars to improve America’s behavioral health system.

Which of course means it is time for the House and president to propose slashing $330 billion in funding from education and workforce in favor of “workforce” in the form of ideas that were stale during the Contract with America era.

Great.

So?

You shouldn’t have to be a perfect poor person to benefit from the money the federal government has put aside to help you get a job.

What do we do about it?

Above all, be grown-ups, not judgmental jerks, about the people America’s workforce programs are meant to help when you’re making policy. You could call this stance preachy or moralizing or woke or whatever, but at core, it’s just competent policymaking. If you’re building a workforce system for the people who need the help the least, then you’re building a workforce system for no one at all.

Hello, valued customer

Welcome to the reign of terror that is the paywall era of JOBS THAT WORK. I now have tens of your dollars, and I will buy so many affordably priced lunch specials with them.

In all seriousness, I remain thrilled by the ongoing reception to this newsletter and the across-the-board subscriber growth I have seen the past couple weeks. There is a long way yet to go for this platform, especially in a newsletter market that is quite oversaturated, but I appreciate you continuing to share and sign up.

A couple of updates:

• Price changes for annual subscriptions. The early-bird discount is now over, which means annual subscriptions are now $100 a year. Still a great value for what you pay month to month, and those annual signups help me a ton in planning the rest of my year next to my consulting business.

• Group subscription discount and other discounts. I plan to let my rates sit for a little bit so Business Nick can diagnose the best path going forward. That said, I am exploring a special group discount for nonprofits who can use the information I share here but are facing a lot of uncertainty at the moment. Currently, every annual group subscription is discounted $10 per person. Thoughts and questions, email me at nick@jobsthat.work.

• Reminder: Founding Readers get a 45-minute conversation with me on their workforce questions and needs. I started these last week with my first crop of Founding Readers. These conversations reminded me there is a startling amount of information on these topics and various D.C. machinations of years past lurking in my brain, some of which I don’t feel comfortable sharing here. The price point on this subscription level is $150 per year, which is a good value considering my current consulting rate. Also, this is the rate most likely to shift upward depending on my schedule, so FYI if you have been considering it.

Card subject to change

This week, you will hear a little less from me in this venue unless something truly calamitous happens. Speaking of which: I am monitoring the situation over at DOL, where more firings of probationary staff appear to continue apace. (The Office of Special Counsel has recommended a halt to probationary firings because they do not appear to be in compliance with the law.)

Oh, and the Senate HELP Committee is expected to vote on Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination this week and hold a hearing on the Deputy Secretary nominee who is overseeing the Department’s de-staffing.

I will have a quick paid subscriber edition if and when Chavez-DeRemer is confirmed. I also have an item for paid subscribers on a grants scenario so unnervingly possible that I am trying to figure out whether to couch it in an extended joke to avoid frightening people more than it should.

Good times all around.

FRIDAY: Updated grants listings and updates. Hoping to start bringing in state-specific grant opportunities this week in addition to my weekly rating of whether these federal dollars will ever get spent.

TUESDAY: Research underlines that WIOA isn’t great at getting people to good-paying jobs. I have an idea for how to fix that. For once, it’s not spend more money.

1. There were two awful murders at two separate Job Corps centers before I started working on the program full time in 2015. The first in St. Louis involved a student being shot dead in his bed with a gun passed by a student through a fence. The second irks me to read and write about, so I’ll let you read the Miami Herald’s writeup here if you want.

2. Reduced to liquid form, this form of Southern passive aggression would taste like sweet tea and kill you within seconds.

3. Welcome to another edition of Is This Doomed?, a newsletter within a newsletter’s footnotes about whether a program or office of the federal government is about to be eliminated by Congress and the Trump Administration. This edition asks a question I have gotten quite a bit over the past few weeks:

“Job Corps: Is this doomed?”

Probably not? I think?

Conservative thinktanks have wanted to kill Job Corps for years now, but Job Corps has a contractor association and its own caucus on the Hill. Eliminating Job Corps would require amending WIOA, which, if you want to know priorities, has its own provision meant to make it harder to close Job Corps centers. Closing the entire system also would leave some students homeless, which, even if this administration is OK with that, I’m not sure that members will be.

Anything is possible, but I think that a system-wide closure or reinvention is unlikely with those headwinds, the margins in the House, and everything else the Hill is trying to do this spring. The Hill could try to trim the footprint down quite a bit, and maybe a member will volunteer to have a center closed in their district, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up.

That leaves the question of what the Trump Administration wants to do. If the first administration offers any clues, the answer is as much Not Job Corps as possible. The first administration used law authorizing experimental projects to farm out centers to the National Guard’s Youth ChalleNGe program, the State of Idaho, and HBCUs.

4. Congress has funded the program at the same level for so long that DOL recently took actions, including transferring students away from two centers, to improve sustainability amid rising operating costs.