The workforce debate, Job Corps’ last days, and $1.2 billion in grants.
Plus, the Trump Administration re-ups... DEIA grants?
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Hello
Greetings from D.C., where I’m presently powering through it thanks to Celsius and cussedness.
I have gotten a lot of questions this week about workforce funding and the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act”—including “Is it really called that?” and “Is it time we had a national holiday celebrating each year one stunning, linebacker-sized person named Bill?” Below, for paid subscribers, I outline the state of play and the things I’m minding as the Senate considers the centerpiece of the Extra Crispy Trump Agenda—and clarify what it does and doesn’t mean for workforce spending.
Due to some uncertainty—see immediately below!—I’m holding off on program predictions for another week.
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News you should know affecting money that gets people to work.
Trump Administration says it’s shutting down Job Corps. Here are all the legal and practical problems with that.
The thing we all expected—the Trump Administration announcing it’s terminating all of Job Corps’ contracts and ending the program—finally got its planted Fox News story on Thursday afternoon.
As I describe below, there are a lot of legal problems here in the Administration’s approach and many, many questions. First, though, I want to flag that the Trump Administration seems to be playing with political fire at a particularly critical time.
Job Corps got a bit of a shot in the arm last week with strong support for continuing the program from Maine Sen. Susan Collins, chair of the Appropriations Committee—and with a Committee-issued statement to boot. Constructive criticism: I think it was a bad strategy to start shutting down the program at centers in the Senate Appropriations Chair’s home state when you’re trying to pass a budget bill that enacts most of your Administration’s agenda.
Job Corps has faced threats before and Congress bailed them out, with the Hill wiring traps into the program’s statutory foundations that the Administration now appears to be tapdancing over. If I were a senator (or a contractor), here are questions I would be asking this morning.
1. Can the Trump Administration show that it’s following the law for closing Job Corps centers?
The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, America’s main pot of workforce dollars and the congressionally set bones of Job Corps, says that the decision to close a Job Corps center must be announced in a Federal Register notice and given a 30-day comment period, per 29 U.S.C. 3209(j). The Administration is being careful to say it’s pausing or suspending operations to try to show this is not a closure. Frankly, that’s a little hard to believe when DOL says it is terminating contracts, the White House has called for the end of the program, and the Administration gave Fox News an exclusive on its plans to save students from “unsafe” centers.
Something that occurred to me years ago was how unbelievably clean the process would need to be if DOL ever had to mass close privately contracted centers. The means of challenging a closure are a bit of an open question, but given that some of these companies only operate Job Corps centers, bad process likely meant there were good grounds for an injunction that could be rough to work through. Trump administrations tend to be challenged in process and execution. Seems relevant to mention both of these things now.
2. What happens to the money the Administration gets from selling off potentially high-priced Job Corps property?
A potent point that I can’t believe I forgot about in my rundown of issues in Tuesday’s videos: under 29 U.S.C. 3280(g), if DOL sells a Job Corps property, it must put that money back into “carry[ing] out” the Job Corps program. Some Job Corps centers have aged into hotly sought-after properties for redevelopment while also becoming increasingly difficult facilities to maintain with low congressional appropriations. The federal government could raise a substantial amount of money from selling, for example, part of an island in the middle of San Francisco Bay.
Congress will have to cauterize that provision if it goes along with closing Job Corps. If it doesn’t, well, this provision could still be used reduce overhead, improve Job Corps’ sustainability, and increase the resources available to its students.
And if Congress doesn’t OK a full Job Corps closure, it raises questions as to what the heck the Trump Administration is doing with that money if there is no Job Corps to “carry out.” I suspect the answer would be “offsetting costs to the American people from suspending the unsafe Job Corps program and returning excess appropriations to the Treasury.”
However, this is a provision that is hard to read as allowing anything other than continuing to fund Job Corps with property taken from Job Corps.
3. What happens to the federally run centers?
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, through the Forest Service, operates a fifth of Job Corps centers on nominally conservation-focused centers, some of which help fight forest fires. These centers appear omitted from the Fox the story and the Administration’s plans announced on Thursday. So what happens to them? Is the Administration saying that only contracted centers are “unsafe”? Is it going to remake them?
These Civilian Conservation Centers can be more costly and underperforming because they’re older facilities. Commenters on one closure suggested it was a Nazi POW camp in World War II. There also aren’t really enough conservation jobs to justify this big of a footprint.
A major rethink of the CCCs is overdue but has been off the table for several years because of how much the first Trump Administration pissed off Congress in an attempt to privatize or close them. Based on what they were hollering at us, Hill staff thought it was a sloppy and haphazard process not based on any data or evidence—particularly the Republican staff.
The result was an appropriations rider—that appears fully intact—saying DOL couldn’t spend any money on closing these federally operated centers and it can’t touch the agreement between DOL and the Agriculture Department that allows DOL to wire over money to run those centers.
There is a potential out for the Administration on the rider… maybe. The rider says those centers can close if “necessary to prevent the endangerment of the health and safety of the students,” and I expect the Trump Administration to liberally read that language based on the “harm” it says is being done to Job Corps students now. (More on that below.) But it also comes with a catch: the capacity of the Job Corps program must stay the same after a federal center’s closure. Obviously, capacity isn’t the same if you’re draining students from the whole system. Even with the Trump Administration’s legal innovations, I struggle to see a way around that without congressional intervention.
4. With its workforce plans, why would the Administration get rid of 100-plus readymade training facilities for workers, including apprentices?
Despite the real estate portfolio’s many warts, some Job Corps centers have excellent facilities for hands-on training. It is not an uncommon practice for programs recertifying tradespeople to want to use the facilities for weekend refresher courses, for example. Some centers have partnered with car manufacturers like Toyota and Mercedes to train service workers.
It’s conceivable the Administration will try to repurpose these spaces for other programs, but if that’s the plan, it doesn’t line up with the scorched-earth language in the President’s budget proposal. Congressional staffers are starting to ask questions about how spending less on things like apprenticeship means we will get more apprentices. What happens with these facilities probably should be a follow up to those questions—especially given the Republican furor this week over how many jobs are expected to be lost to AI.
5. What happens to students who have no other safe place to live?
Bluntly, human stories don’t move much in Washington these days because of a belief that the last election meant we don’t have to care about people who need help. I put this item last not to undersell the importance—because as someone who put a lot of time and brainpower into the program, this is the question haunting me right now—but to make sure you don’t leave this piece without an understanding of the real cost of closing Job Corps. Especially since this is a move that pretty nakedly has less to do with helping young people and more about checking a lingering to-do off a list in a Heritage Foundation conference room.
Some Job Corps students have nowhere to go and will be unhoused if the program closes, which undercuts the (greatly exaggerated) safety problems DOL told Fox about. This was why the first Trump Administration couldn’t close down every Job Corps center in response to COVID.
Last week, Susan Collins told a personal story about meeting a once-unhoused Job Corps graduate and noted that students are more likely to be unsafe not living at a Job Corps center. She said she was worried about students being trafficked, addicted to drugs, or worse without Job Corps.
Two weeks ago, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer indicated changes to Job Corps were coming because of worries about young people like the one mentioned to Collins. She suggested to House appropriators that an alternative option for the population was under consideration. Per the Fox story, the alternative settled upon appears to be—and apologies for using a highly technical term like this—not a damn thing.
So, if Sen. Collins and her contemporaries don’t like teenagers being homeless or trafficked or dead, will they do anything to intervene?
This week’s grants listings number: $1.2 billion.
Number go up, but some big grants come off the board in the next couple weeks, and there is some weird stuff happening. The Trump Administration keeps posting or re-upping grants focused on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. Granted, these programs were authorized by Congress and some are decades old (and approved by past Republican presidents). Some of this may be autopilot posting initiated in the Biden-Harris Administration, but given the political activity at some of these agencies, I’m a bit surprised to see these grants coming out.
The good news is there is a huge slate of Health and Human Services grants coming out in the next few weeks. The bad news is I’m not sure that’s a stable pile of cash, either.
Behind the paywall.
What grant awards are still missing?
What’s up with the Administration’s efforts to collapse workforce into one agency?
What should you be doing to prepare for big federal workforce funding changes?