Welcome to workforce purgatory, 'missing' $200 million, and $1.6 billion in grants listings.
Plus, another pot of DOGE-disliked grants are back, an interesting take on what's in that DOL-Ed partnership, and the new workforce side of AI.
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Hello
Greetings from D.C., where I swear I have taken off the costume.
It’s hot outside. Why would I have not taken off the costume?
Toplines
News you should know affecting money that gets people to work.
Entering workforce purgatory.
It’s been a consequential week in federal workforce funding due to what’s not happening.
Not happening is the House doing work before September, as Speaker Mike Johnson tries to avoid his caucus voting on releasing the Department of Justice’s Jeffrey Epstein files that reportedly mention the President. As I wrote last week, this has real consequences on the big lingering questions for the future of federal workforce development. It does not sound like Congress is on the same page with the White House folks who drafted the Administration’s budget request. The House Appropriations Committee already cleared a bill that didn’t make major workforce eliminations at the Department of Commerce.
Also not happening this week is the White House releasing a three-agency report talking smack about existing federal workforce funding programs. The report was due to the White House this past Tuesday, per an April 23 Executive Order. It’s entirely possible it too is being held back because of the Epstein firestorm as well as avoiding losing oxygen to this week’s AI and other announcements. (More below for paid subscribers—and Tuesday for everybody—on the AI front.)
The report’s outcome seemed to have been spoiled by the budget request that eliminated all but one or two of DOL’s workforce programs and replaced them with a much smaller block grant. The justification for doing so in in the budget request is very thin. A Job Corps report from earlier this spring doesn’t look like it will outright kill that program, based on the number of Republicans in both chambers opposed to the move. If the Administration is serious, it would be lovely to see some actual goods on why it’s eliminating most of America’s workforce dollars.
The other thing that might happen in the near future is a second rescissions package—or legislation getting Congress to take back money it appropriated—which the White House is running out of time to put together to hit procedural checkpoints ahead of the end of the fiscal year. Purportedly, a second package is on the way aimed (at least) at undisclosed parts of the Department of Education.
That said, I have heard this week about interim steps being taken by the Administration to begrudgingly preserve the operation of programs it’s trying to end, which followed it posting a new funding opportunity for a grant program it wanted to end. That means we’re in a kind of purgatory on the future of workforce. The Administration is going to keep operating programs it doesn’t want to run, but just barely. Congress could unstick money that should be on the street by including more of it in a funding bill, but it’s fled town.
Just because Congress has fled the city doesn’t mean an Education, Labor, and Health funding bill can’t be released by House Appropriations Committee during the six weeks before members reconvene. But the committee has noticeably kept the time gaps around release, markup, and passage very, very short. If that pattern holds, I would expect it to be a very rushed and consequential September. The question is will anything significant break before then?
The return of the international labor grant.
A few months ago, DOGE and the new leadership at the Department of Labor made a big deal about getting rid of DOL’s international labor grants portfolio. Much of the money was aimed at curbing child labor, something that Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Senate Republicans had just attempted to claim as a priority.
The international grants always have tended to have very dry names that don’t say a ton about the project. That made them easy targets in The High DOGE Era because the projects involved a decent amount of cash and it was easy to write a mean tweet about the names—even if some America-relevant work was spelled out a few lines beneath the title. DOL also claimed it was part of an “America First” effort to refocus the money stateside (which it really couldn’t do due to basic appropriations law).
Now, four months and many mean tweets later, DOL has forecasted three foreign-labor grant projects in the past week, totaling about $27 million. If you’re looking for a big difference, it’s the names—as Trump II really, really gets that comms can be most of the battle.
There is a “critical mineral supply chains” grant that seems like a continuation of DOL’s previous child labor work. There is another grant on “leveling the playing field for American workers”—already a key, albeit underplayed goal for DOL international grants due to trade agreements—and another about “revitalizing domestic manufacturing” through foreign shipbuilding projects. I suspect the last will be used to show that the Administration was serious about refocusing on American workers, even if it’s very much an international grant.
DOL’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs, which runs these grants, was an early target of the deferred resignation offers that ultimately trimmed 20 percent off all of DOL. But the White House’s burn-heavy budget proposals only called for a small cut to the agency. And at least one of the new grants looks like it won’t be funded until fiscal year 2026.
All this indicates that the Trump II DOL has a vision that includes ILAB, something that didn’t seem particularly assured in March. In light of that and these first glimpses of the new funding, it’s not unfair to ask what was the point of killing all those other grants.
Beyond mean tweets, of course.
This week’s grants listings number: $1.6 billion.
EPA money! In this economy!
Behind the paywall.
$200 million “missing” on a top administration workforce priority. NBD.
Making credentialing make sense through the Ed-DOL marriage?
The workforce funding side of this week’s Trump AI plan.