Still workin': Lawmakers liked the ‘social alchemy' story of Job Corps, not the people it helped.

An updated look on how happy political narratives supporting workforce development cause bad policy.

This piece originally published on February 25, 2025. I have edited portions of it based on new developments and added some updates on the future of Job Corps at the end.

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 congressional oversight in the aftermath. For brevity, I summarize the situation 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 Corps 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 comes out in the shape of a Citizen with a Job.

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.

Despite protestations to the contrary, Congress doesn’t spend much money on these programs once you factor all the directions they’re split and the overabundance of need. 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.

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 to cut all the money in favor 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.

The misleading ways the Trump Administration is trying to kill Job Corps.

Since I first published this newsletter in February, the Trump Administration has started taking steps to get rid of Job Corps, calling for its elimination in its budget request, halting enrollment, and publishing a six-tab spreadsheet it calls a comprehensive “transparency report” showing not terribly transparent³ calculations of inflated costs per graduate. The report was signal boosted by Fox News shortly after publication.

Below, I talk about what’s wrong with the report and what specific challenges Job Corps faces due to bad politics and attempts to save money. It’s very hard to build a nationwide training infrastructure, so to take advantage of what the government already has while getting better results, I talk about what real Job Corps reform would look like.

What’s wrong with that Trump Job Corps spreadsheet

The challenges of Job Corps

What should reform look like?

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 to 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 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. If you personally know the concept of irony, it may be time to call the police to do a wellness check. It’s been a little while, and I’m starting to fear the worst.