What Trump II will pay for, AI ain't doing hot, and $1.9 billion in grants listings.

Plus, there weren't any new federal grants for the first half of the week. That was kinda weird.

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Toplines

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

Countdown.

We’re 40 days from the end of the fiscal year. More than $260 million in workforce grant dollars haven’t yet been announced or opened to competition, including around $200 million in apprenticeship money. The government must award this money by September 30, when the congressional deadline for awarding these funds expires.

The Department of Labor pulled another $250,000 off the board on Thursday, publishing another mining grant. It has some interesting clues for what is happening in this space after the grants executive order a couple weeks back. More behind the paywall.

A possibly significant ‘Huh’ of the week.

The August 7 Trump grantmaking executive order told agencies not to issue new grant solicitations until they had installed the “processes” it called for. Most of these processes amounted to “Tell Dave he’s in charge of grants now—and he actually has to read them this time.” Twenty-six grants published between the publication of the executive order and last Friday, so I didn’t think of it as a hold. The Trump Administration hasn’t been subtle about holding up money.

And then… federal grants stopped for five days. Save for holidays, that doesn’t really happen based on my dig through the horrors of grants.gov’s user interface.

Things briefly picked back up on Wednesday. This gap is especially unusual for this time of the year because the Administration is behind on grants that need to get spent before September 30, the end of the period Congress gave the executive branch to award them.

I haven’t seen or heard anything that says this affirmatively was a thing or that the executive order is a reason why. The new Brookwood-Sago grant has some very stern-sounding new language related to the order, and I cover that behind the paywall. But taking a look at the seven grants that published since Wednesday, it appears to be in the minority—even compared to heavily Trumpified agencies like the Department of Justice.

But if the point of the executive order was for the grants spigot to cut off on August 7, that didn’t happen. In Trump I, there definitely were moments where the White House would send a message to agencies in a way that is the organizational equivalent of a baseball coach teaching social studies dropping a text book on the floor to make the kids shut up and pay attention. (Shoutout to Alabama public schools.)

Is this that? I don’t know, but it’s worth keeping an eye on, I think.

AI sucks at being people. That will have funding consequences.

I’m talking about this in THE MONEY because the failure rate has a ton of implications for how workforce money is spent. Last week’s Trump workforce blueprint was the third or fourth Administration document that boldly committed to a jobs policy of “We’re going to do good at the AI stuff, whatever the businesses tell us it will turn out to be.”

Businesses don’t really know that themselves right now. It’s early still, but as I wrote last month, the AI skills most in demand are human skills needed to integrate AI in the workplace. That’s definitely not replacement of humans, and dropping scores of humans from the workplace now is the equivalent of a contractor firing all its carpenters because it bought a couple power drills that suggest what bit to use.

If businesses don’t know what they’re doing, or the information isn’t terribly useful, then the workforce money eventually spent here by the Administration could end up hurled in some foggy and pointless-seeming directions. That’s not great for responding to actual workforce needs, but it also presents an opportunity for organizations that are capable of filling in the gap of what the government should be doing.

And more likely than not, there’s a decent chance that the people who get that money could make a big dent in how businesses use AI effectively—since the research suggests employers are struggling with it now.

This week’s grants listings number: $1.9 billion.

Well, clearly there wasn’t a lot of new federal money this week. But we had new DOL money arrive on Thursday and generally held steady with what’s out on the street.

Behind the paywall.

• The Administration is interested in paying for worker transportation and other services after they finish their training. That’s neat.

• Wait, but they also kinda want other people to pay for those things during training and maybe signaling they might not pay for job training. That’s… not neat.

• What a new DOL grant says if you’re applying for workforce money soon.