The Workforce Annihilator Bill advances, new Job Corps developments, and $1.8 billion in grants listings.

Plus, a Harvard tech schools update and more bad news for a long-delayed grant announcement.

Sep 12, 2025

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JOBS THAT WORK: THE MONEY is a weekly rundown of the news and grant listings important for people who use money to get people to work, with exclusive intel and insights for paid subscribers. It’s brought to you by

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Hello

Greetings from D.C., where if you missed it, yesterday’s newsletter talked about how the Trump Administration quietly awarded one state $35.8 million for apprenticeship and I published the winners of several Department of Labor workforce grants that the agency awarded months ago, but didn’t announce. Which I continue to feel weird about.

Behind the paywall, I have some more updates on missing money and what I found in my research.

Toplines

News you should know about the money that gets people to work.

Countdown.

We’re 18 days from the end of the fiscal year. Unless a surprise competition hits in the next few days, there is a good chance these grants will expire with it: Workforce Opportunity in Rural Community ($50 million), Susan Harwood Occupational Safety Grants ($12.7 million), and likely unspent Women’s Bureau grants funding (approximately $1 million).

House appropriators again advance bill halving much of American workforce spending.

On Tuesday, the full House Appropriations Committee advanced a bill eliminating two of the most consistent sources of funding for workforce development in the United States, along with cuts that would halve the largest residential training program in the country and cut hundreds of millions of dollars for older workers.

A year ago, a similar bill did not make it through the full committee, and Democrats offered several amendments that would have restored workforce and other funding cut in the bill. Those amendments failed almost uniformly on party-line votes. Republicans’ defense of the bill remains that the funding is duplicative and “nice to have,” in the words of Rep. Robert Aderholt, R-Ala., who chairs the subcommittee that crafted the bill. It’s an unsatisfactory answer, but this also was the last appropriations bill and only had the leftovers of other budget allocations, something flagged several times by Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis.

It’s not yet clear to me that the full House will pass this bill in its current state. It might be in a better (or more willing) position to rearrange cash for programs that generally have bipartisan support. But based on this week and last week’s votes, I think it’s reasonable to assume it will pass in its current shape.

Among lawmakers, the assumption appears to be that the Senate will restore a good bit of the funding cut here. A quarter of the Senate has backed a bill keeping workforce funding at 2024 levels. That bill has been shepherded by the Senate appropriations chair, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who backed the Job Corps program after the Trump Administration’s failed (for now) attempt to unilaterally end it in the spring.

But I’m not sure it is advisable to bet on the status quo, if you’re in workforce. The Administration—which doesn’t have much motivation to negotiate—seems deadset on killing these programs based on faulty premises, and they definitely lack the same urgency of other planned cuts. Democrats spent much of their time seizing upon political damage (and actual health risks) tied to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and trying to head off planned Education cuts that would result in the layoff of 72,000 teachers.

I think workforce funding will end up a lower priority, based on Tuesday’s hearing—even if Collins and others have affection for the programs. There might be an effort on one side or the other to try to leverage this into a reauthorization of workforce programs, but having seen this game of chicken turn into a head-on crash in the past, I wouldn’t bank on it. If funding gets cut here, it’s probably going to stay cut.

More on who should be worried and an interesting Job Corps rider behind the paywall.

This week’s grants listings number: $1.8 billion.

The good news is we don’t have another run of hyper-short grant application periods this week. The bad news is that we don’t have a lot more federal money hitting the street. Still, I added a couple new state opportunities, including one in a state that I don’t recall appearing on the listings before today.

Job Corps stuff good and bad and probably also bad.
More bad news for some long-missing workforce money.
DOL-Ed announce next steps in their workforce marriage.