What throwing Education into the Department of Labor actually means.

Here's what's actually happening, and how it affects workforce, how it affects education, and how it affects common sense.

Well, that happened.

On Tuesday, the Trump Administration announced that it set up bureaucratic agreements that split much of the Department of Education’s programs and duties among other federal agencies, in a mimic of an agreement with the Department of Labor earlier this year to unite much of America’s workforce training programs under one roof.¹

In an effort to “break up the federal education bureaucracy and return education to the states” and move programs to places “best positioned to deliver results for students and taxpayers.” Somehow, this logics into placing much of America’s regulation and funding—everything from preschool to college—to America’s chief workforce agency, DOL’s Employment and Training Administration.

I’m sure I’ll have plenty more to say about how this builds upon Trump II’s shortsighted education-should-only-be-jobs-training policy default, something I now feel rather glad to have written about several weeks ago.

But as a former attorney and policymaker at DOL who brokered interagency collaborations over money, I wanted to clarify for the people who rely on these agencies what’s really happening here, how chaotic and cramped this will make administration of education and workforce programs, and whether this is, you know, legal.

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