The Labor Secretary spending scandal, aspirations vs. reality in Trump II's workforce plans, and $7.4 billion in grants listings.
Plus, Trump II's workforce leaders talk about their plans for what's next.
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Behind today’s paywall.
How shifts caused by the Labor Secretary scandal could impact workforce.
Trump II is being awfully timid in how it spends its money on the things it wants.
Toplines.
News you should know about money and things getting people to work.
Trump team talks workforce plans.
On Wednesday, Jobs for the Future held a live interview with a panel of four Trump Administration officials involved in building Trump II’s workforce agenda.
There were more than a few interesting nuggets as to where the Administration might be going next and how it’s couching what it’s done so far. Below, I cover a few toplines, and behind the paywall, I dig into the contrast between a pitch Trump II made on Wednesday and what it’s actually doing with its money.
Waiting for go-and-do.
Here’s what stood out to me the most from Wednesday’s conversation: despite everything, Trump II seems to be doing a fair amount of waiting on other people to tell it what to do on the workforce system. That seems very un-Trumpian, but it’s pretty much where its choices have left it at the moment.
Last summer, Trump II proposed two separate, dramatic redos of federal workforce funding, neither of which seems to have the foothold on the Hill they need to become reality. Trump II‘s near-term focus, then, appears to be carrying out state-by-state shifts in how workforce money gets spent.
Getting there requires some necessary wait and see—namely, waiting and seeing if states want to be part of this stuff. Between August and November last year, the Department of Labor issued two guidance documents inviting states to ask for DOL approval to waive portions of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act’s structures, the law governing much of America’s workforce spending. The November document gave states a menu of examples of what waivers DOL would approve, something I thought the first document sorely needed.
That made it interesting on Wednesday that Marek Laco, DOL’s deputy assistant secretary for employment and training, emphasized that the examples in the November document are not exhaustive, meaning that states can—and should—approach DOL for waiving requirements that have bedeviled them in the past. It made me curious as to how much uptake DOL has gotten on those waiver requests.
Laco’s pitch—one that seemed to be echoed by other officials on the stream—was that if one particular component of WIOA or the law had created a roadblock for a state, they should reach out to Trump II for relief. The challenge is that, in some states, the parts of the law bothering them the most are pretty much all of them. Accordingly, by being so open-ended in its invitation, DOL might be overwhelming states with an abundance of choice.
The Trump White House also isn’t exactly doing DOL favors. I gather there have been discussions of waiver requests in blue states—including the types of things Trump II could claim as proof of concept—but also deep reluctance to seek out waivers based on skepticism that they would get approved or applied in a way that wasn’t punitive.
For what it’s worth, I do think the Trump II crew is genuinely trying to court collaboration to carry out its bureaucratic redecoration. The Administration wants to provide “concierge” assistance to states administering the Department of Education’s suite of workforce dollars, said Nick Moore, the acting assistant secretary of Ed’s technical education office.
“We want to help you get to ‘Yes,’” Moore said. “If you want to do something, we want to help you get it done.”
Measuring expectations about talent marketplaces.
On Tuesday, Ed launched its $15 million challenge to develop talent marketplaces that help employers and workers connect more on skills. This vein of workforce project has a lot of hype—Rep. Burgess Owens, R-Utah, at a hearing last month likened talent marketplaces to the discovery of human flight—but there have been challenges in getting employers to use them.
Moore, who helped build the lauded Alabama talent marketplace, was a bit more measured than Owens.
“There’s many employers who want to hire folks but they can’t seem to source the talent,” Moore said during the JFF event. “Talent marketplaces are not a panacea, but they are a much stronger tool in our toolkit.”
The unsatisfying political lines on workforce.
As noted in an Ed after-action report, the early verdict is that the Ed-DOL merger is off to a rocky start. Following his secretary’s lead, Moore talked up the move of Ed grantees to DOL as an infrastructure upgrade and defended bringing education and workforce programs together.
“People who are paid to navel gaze about this stuff think that academic and technical skills are mutually exclusive,” but they are not, Moore said.
I’m not sure if Moore meant congressional Democrats when talking about the “people who are paid to navel gaze,” but there have been some similarities in reasoning, or at least by one member. At a November hearing, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon dropped a particularly befuddling line that career and technical education was “not career and technical jobs training," an awfully thin line to draw at best.
Still, here’s a statement that seems awfully relevant this week in Congress: Republicans are more vulnerable than they think on jobs policy. They’re too focused on high-level bureaucratic rearrangement, talking up the possibilities of the AI and stuff with computers extended universe, and paying employers to do stuff. None of those stances seems terribly attuned to the workers who actually do jobs, of which I understand there are more than a few.
That said, if Democrats’ position remains “Everything should remain the same in all the ways until the heat death of the universe”—particularly in reference to a workforce system legislated into a suitcase in the name of “bipartisanship”—that ain’t exactly compelling, either.
AI, ‘theoretical job loss,’ and what’s next.
Speaking of AI, DOL’s Chief Innovation Officer Taylor Stockton talked about looking into how “the Department of Labor create[s] an R&D lab supporting American workers in the age of AI.” He complained about “fearmongering” about AI and speculation over “theoretical job loss.”
“This administration believes AI can unlock a lot of new opportunities for workers,” Stockton said.
Dave Langdon, the Department of Commerce’s deputy policy director, said that his agency plans to put $25 million into workforce projects coming out of last summer’s White House AI action plan.
More behind the paywall.
This week’s grant listings number: $7.4 billion.
We’re moving through a lot of January deadlines, but one big money federal grant got extended again, and a new state joins the list for the first time.