The $251 million in workforce money that's about to go away.

Lining up missing-in-action DOL dollars and how to prepare for a quick competition.

I have spent several weeks warning people that a summer workforce grants blitz was likely coming. After more than a quarter of the Senate voted last week to preserve workforce funding—and mostly restore it to 2024 funding levels—I think that’s even more likely.

This would track what’s happened elsewhere. In late July, Health and Human Services pushed out a complicated trio of more than $100 million in funding opportunities with a two-week deadline. The deadline there looked a lot like what happens when a grant official levels with political leadership, puts a date on a calendar, and says, “This is the last date by which we can do this competition and finish it and not die or get sued or expose the agency to bad reporting on a project that bought horses for a farm because people like looking at horses and therefore that will improve the healthiness of relationships among families in rural America.” Or something like that, at least.

For Department of Labor, my understanding always was that date is around August 28 or 29, if you were OK with making your grants staff’s lives especially miserable.

DOL, by my count, has up to $251 million that expires on September 30. All this money is cash Senate appropriators voted last week to bring back. While I won’t rule out anything, it is highly unlikely the White House will put forward a second rescissions package just aimed at this money and a few other late grants—and my read is we’re a week beyond the procedural deadline for doing so for this fiscal year.

Accordingly, below I describe for paid readers what money is still out there, what they should know about it, and how best to prepare for it coming out—and if any shenanigans still could keep it from coming out. I’m coming to you a little off-schedule because the application timeframe could be really, really, really tight. Knowing what’s out there sooner than later will help you prepare for whether this is worth an application in a year where funding has gone away and otherwise been very uncertain.