Senate appropriators vote to save Job Corps and against block grants, and $1.6 billion in grants listings.
Plus: the latest on a frozen program for older workers and DOJ defines what DEIA is 'illegal' DEIA.
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Hello
Greetings from D.C., where it’s sort of a Beadle Across America week.
Today, I have a piece in the excellent Extra Points newsletter on the business of college sports, which I highly recommend regardless of Nick Beadle content levels. I write about how grant money could play into the impact of the Trump Administration’s college sports executive order with recent four-year school capitulations to the administration. I also center the thing by talking trash about a Mike Stoops defensive gameplan. I had a blast, and I appreciate the great Matt Brown having me as a guest writer.
Earlier this week, I had a great time chatting with the Reach University crew for their Apprenticeship 2.0 podcast, which also deserves your subscription. Their episode with dangerous levels of Nick Beadle publishes on Monday, I’m told.
Toplines
News you should know affecting money that gets people to work.
Senate appropriators vote to save Job Corps, apprentice money, DOL Women’s Bureau.
On Thursday, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted 26-3 in a bill that effectively rejects President Trump’s proposal to eliminate the majority of America’s workforce programs and replace them with a much smaller state-by-state block grant.
The published version of the bill includes the preservation of Job Corps—the largest residential training program in the country, which the Administration has tried to kill—as well as freestanding Registered Apprenticeship funding eliminated in the President’s budget proposal. It also saves the Women’s Bureau, an agency that was an early target of DOGE, as well as its Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations grant program, for which the Administration recently published a new solicitation despite a near-complete termination just weeks earlier.
Let’s be clear here: if you’re advocating for these programs, don’t celebrate yet. It’s reasonable to doubt that Congress will preserve all these programs at these funding levels after the House returns in September from its Epstein quarantine. At a quick glance, the Senate bill largely returns these programs to their fiscal year 2024 funding levels after cuts in a March bill shaped by Speaker Mike Johnson and the White House. I don’t think that’s going to hold given that House appropriators are very, very set on cutting more of the federal government.
But this is undeniably good news for these programs, and a culmination of several weeks of signals that the White House had not sold appropriators on its thin plans to effectively end the federal workforce system and start anew with less money. The House Appropriation Committee’s attempts to see through the White House’s proposal were not going well, and committee leaders indicated it likely would not clear the House.
By fleeing town, the House let the Senate—where Appropriations Chair Susan Collins is a big backer of these programs—define the conversation. It’s not impossible to reframe it, but it isn’t easy either.
A missing piece is an expected White House report, directed by an April 23 White House executive order, that I suspect will attack DOL, Education, and Commerce workforce programs and call for their consolidation, reinvention, or elimination. I would not be surprised if that report finally emerges around the reveal of the corresponding House bill, but who knows? I also would not be surprised if it’s being held because this Senate bill would like an instant rebuke by congressional allies.
When it returns from recess, the House will have very few days to get its bill passed and reconciled with any bill passed by the Senate. If the White House is serious about block grants—also not clear at this stage, given continued references in AI plans to grants that would be killed by its proposal—it might be better off holding until after the appropriations cycle and selling this plan as a full-scale replacement for the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, America’s main source of workforce dollars.
If it does so—and there has been appetite in both chambers to resuscitate last year’s failed remake of WIOA—the White House will need to put some shoulder into it. Budget documents tried to connect the policy dots on this huge change through misstatements of what these programs do and the premise that that grantees would be saved from the “burden” of managing federal grant dollars by eliminating them.
That probably was good enough to get the plan through the subject-matter committees in the House and Senate where committee leadership is new and—constructively—and less inclined to question the Administration. And it might have been good enough to get the bill through the House proper.
But Senate appropriators made up the crowd with whom the White House needed—and still needs—to do the most work. Twenty-six senators from both parties voting this bill out of committee suggests it has plenty left to do, although some of the Republican votes are apt to flip when this comes before the full Senate. “Unburdening” states from job retraining resources isn’t likely to sell well with this morning’s jobs report indicating slower hiring. Poor polling for the Administration’s keystone legislative package—which cut workforce resources from Biden infrastructure bills and access to college—could disadvantage major cuts, too.
It’s not clear if Senate appropriators are willing to do anything to free up previously appropriated pots of this money, including still-frozen money for older workers (more behind the paywall) and a grant fashioned by red-state senators for rural areas in Trump I.
DOL has yet to announce a funding opportunity for the latter grant, Workforce Opportunities in Rural Communities, and its appropriation expires in 60 days. Collins’ committee staff talked up continuing this grant in summarizing highlights of the bill.
It takes 30 days to complete the bare-minimum review on grants applications in my experience, so the clock is ticking. DOL traditionally has kept this grant open longer to court smaller rural organizations that seem to have been senators’ intended recipients for these dollars. If DOL tracks recent deadlines of sister agencies, applicants may have as little as two weeks.
Around workforce: WIOA and manufacturing, good jobs return, apprenticeship, and the jobs AI will eat.
For what looked like a “slow” week, there is plenty happening out there. A few items in brief:
Good jobs ain’t gone yet. Paul at WorkShift had a great edition of The Job newsletter about foundation-backed work in Oklahoma and Maryland to connect workers to better-quality jobs.
As I wrote a few months ago, red states quietly have continued their own forms of the Biden-era push toward good jobs I was part of. That work was geared at training and placement in jobs that pay good wages and treat people well.
There are at least the sprouts of solid good jobs infrastructure in red states given the amount of Biden infrastructure funding that went toward those states.
This comes despite the Trump Administration not outright saying it is against “good jobs,” but making sure the words “good” and “jobs” live on opposite coasts.
Earlier this year, the Administration pointedly struck job quality language from several funding opportunities, ending references to “family-sustaining wages”—a traditional Trump prerogative in workforce—and going so far as to eliminate text saying homeless veterans should end up in safe jobs that pay living wages.
My friends (and former Biden-era DOL and White House colleagues) at The Century Foundation have had some great stuff on improving America’s main pot of workforce cash and expanding access to manufacturing jobs.
On the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, TCF talked about WIOA’s prioritization of lower-paying jobs and why a good jobs focus is necessary.
Along with the Urban Manufacturing Alliance, TCF talked about the importance of supportive services in getting people into good manufacturing jobs.
Also, my old boss (and TCF senior fellow) Julie Su co-wrote a piece on the costs of the deregulatory push at DOL.
Microsoft has published a report on the jobs most at risk and least at risk to AI job loss.
The assessment is based on job tasks broken down in federal data, and there are some interesting outcomes.
Among those at risk are CNC operators, which is an interesting detail in light of the complaints about the “skills gap” from manufacturers.
Speaking of which, the Manufacturing Institute, the workforce arm of the powerful National Association of Manufacturers, has published a policy brief calling for “empowering workforce development through employer leadership” and some changes for Registered Apprenticeship.
NAM was especially influential in Trump I, which pursued a failed split between Registered Apprenticeship and a “privatized” alternative by creating an alternative that had effectively the same features of Registered Apprenticeship, but registration handled by private entities in addition to states and the federal government.
MI doesn’t call for restoration of that failed program in its policy brief, but it asserts that Registered Apprenticeship needs “flexible program models that contain the most essential hallmarks” and calls for DOL to offer incentives for “organizations that are responsive to employers” to help register programs.
Lastly, the advocacy organization Apprenticeships for America wrote DOL workforce leadership earlier this month making recommendations for the Trump Administration’s attempted expansion to 1 million active apprentices.
AFA calls for putting a timeline on when the Administration plans to reach its goal, monthly updates on apprenticeship numbers and industry targets, and the expansion of models paying out incentives in return for apprenticeship programs and hitting apprenticeship goals.
Separately, AFA also calls for taking Congress’ current $285 million appropriation for Registered Apprenticeship—re-upped in the Senate bill I discuss above—and distributing it only by formula.
DOL divvies this cash by multiple methods now, but the formula-only approach would match or outpace the proposed 10 percent Trump block grant cut for Registered Apprenticeship.
This week’s grants listings number: $1.6 billion.
It’s a static week on the workforce front, but overall, there is a good bit of (quick-turnaround) federal money out there, which is an improvement.
Behind the paywall.
An update on those frozen SCSEP funds.
What DOJ’s DEIA guidance means for federal grantees.
Missing money.