Why is Congress so set on a bad workforce bill that's politically dicey?

Plus, more on the Ed-DOL marriage, and $6 billion in grant opportunities.

Quick programming note.

Happy Thanksgiving week! There’s no newsletter this Friday, so this is a combined edition of JOBS THAT WORK heavy and JOBS THAT WORK: THE MONEY. You can quick navigate to today’s paid content by clicking here.

Behind the paywall today:

• The Ed-to-DOL story that’s getting the wrong attention.

• The Ed-to-DOL story that needs more attention.

• Grant listings.

  

The issue.

Some Republican congressional leaders are trying to revive a workforce bill that doesn’t have the political legs—or the chances for success—they think it does.

Explain.

Here’s something I have been told a few times over the last few months: some influential Republicans on the Hill are insistent that they only want to talk about rethinking workforce development if it’s the A Stronger Workforce for America Act, or ASWA, a bill that would reauthorize most of America’s main sources of workforce dollars.

The short answer as to why can be chalked up to two beliefs by Republicans: that there remains a bipartisan deal in place to move ASWA, and ASWA fixes most of the workforce system’s problems and paves a smooth runway for a trendy conservative idea for workforce to take off.

Problem is, neither belief is reality.

Let’s take a quick step back for the uninitiated: America’s most consistent streams for funding jobs programs come from a law called the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act of 2014, or WIOA. Technically, WIOA “expired” years ago, and there have been multiple efforts to try to reauthorize it, none of which have managed to make it through both chambers of Congress. The most recent was ASWA, a bipartisan measure that died shortly after last year’s presidential election when—and this is the actual factual explanation used by GOP Hill staff—Elon Musk tweeted stuff with a half an idea and that made Republicans shaky about passing it.

I know people who worked very, very hard on ASWA and hoped it would become law. I want to acknowledge that work and how much this outcome sucked. That said, the main appeal of ASWA was the theory that if both parties got behind the workforce system, the second Trump Administration wouldn’t burn workforce programs to the ground. The actions of the second Trump Administration have refuted that about as strongly as possible, with the Administration simply not spending the money.

The situation is further complicated by the recent move of Department of Education programs to the Department of Labor. I struggle to see Democrats backing ASWA unless it guarantees that Ed will keep running Ed programs, particularly if more Dems build upon the “Things are named stuff!” argument that showed up at a House hearing last week.

The Trump Administration and its congressional allies would balk at putting Ed back in Ed, given that it rolls back probably the Administration’s most consequential and tangible move on workforce. I also could see Senate Democrats and (maybe the odd Republican) wanting some guarantees the money actually gets spent—something else that is quite balkable in the Administration’s view. The Trump Administration also has multiple, subtly conflicting block grant plans for workforce, which I’m sure will end up in a separate bill at some point.

All this means congressional stumping for ASWA doesn’t really make political sense in the current moment. And there’s another reason it doesn’t make sense, too: speaking as someone who helped implement WIOA for more than a decade, ASWA makes a lot of WIOA’s problems worse.

Why is ASWA not worth the effort?

Let’s first talk about what ails WIOA: when it passed WIOA, Congress was in a real “let’s go get a big bunch of data that kinda makes Congress feel better about spending money” phase. The result was WIOA’s performance measures, which prioritize moving as many bodies through the system as possible. That approach tends to favor the cheapest possible training that results in the first job available, which tends to be a lower-paying one. Overall, that’s a worse use of federal resources because worse-paying jobs tend to have harder time retaining workers in the future. Accordingly, by routing workers to worse jobs, WIOA makes it more likely the federal government will spend more on those when they need help in the future.

The performance measures also cost a lot and don’t tell us anything useful. I once spoke a workforce official in one red state who had to choose hiring someone to do paperwork over actually helping workers. I know of another red state that developed its own measures for program success because state leaders wanted data that actually spoke to what they and employers were looking for.

I don’t think Congress has ever really acknowledged the extent of these problems. I gather some of that to avoid ruffling members who still very much believe in the bodies-and-paper approach in WIOA. ASWA doesn’t fix the problems. Instead, it makes tweaks and additions that likely will make them worse.

For example, it further emphasizes cheapness, requiring a ratio that measures wage gains compared to the cost of a program. That measure is likely to disincentivize Registered Apprenticeship, paid training opportunities with built-in requirements for wages to advance with skills. Apprenticeships tends to take longer—it’s a job—and costs more money as a result. The Government Accountability Office found earlier this year that only 2 percent of core WIOA funding touches Registered Apprenticeship, which is hard to separate from the bodies-and-paper approach to grading success under WIOA. I don’t expect that would get better with this new measure.

The bill also requires 50 percent of most workforce spending go toward that has-to-be-cheap training, which I understand has more to do with Congress thinking providers have too much staff than improving offerings. When you have pre-inflationary, decade-old research saying things like “so understaffed that they can barely accomplish mandatory requirements,” it seems unwise to chop away at staffing in favor of a worse version of the same problems.

The silver lining that wasn’t.

That said, why some Republicans are so high on ASWA is that it allows some states to set up pilots where they get to ditch many of the ASWA’s requirements and funding splits if they cut back on the state’s bureaucracy of workforce programs. This is heavily flavored by a vision of the workforce system sold by some conservative groups, which argue that more state freedom in regulation, greater state control over the system, and fewer WIOA-required local decisionmakers will equal better results. As I wrote in August, that’s a questionable premise, given that the poster child for this idea—Utah—did a lot more to improve its workforce system than shifting around its bureaucracy.

This also is a more limited and convoluted option than I think the sellers of the bill believe. ASWA requires pilots meet the same problematic performance measures I discuss above. That limits the types of adventures state could choose from.

States can only participate in the pilot if they have a workforce participation rate less than 60 percent and under 5 million residents. Only eight states qualify according to the most recent data. The pilot lasts for five years and can be extended for four years if, among other things, the state is able to show the last three years of the pilot outperformed what preceded it. Reinventing the entirety of a state’s workforce system takes a little bit of time—some states have found it to be easier said than done. Even assuming there will be forgiving eyes at DOL, I wouldn’t bank on states being able to meet those marks.

Then there is the chaos factor. Even if they’re successful, states only have the option of going from “a little ASWA” to “all of the ASWA” at the end of the pilot period. This carries over another problem from WIOA, which is lousy with demonstration and pilot authority, but offers no mechanism of continuing a pilot if its design doesn’t fit into business as usual.

In theory, Congress could pass a law blessing the pilots that work, but it has been 11 years and counting since their last big workforce statute—and 16 before that one. In other words, I wouldn’t bet on it.

In other words, I wouldn’t hold out hope for ASWA just for this.

So what should we do about it?

Well, I would move on from ASWA. It’s not worth the effort, and the effort isn’t likely to pay off.

What should we do instead? That’s something I’m thinking a lot about these days, and the answer is longer than I want to squeeze into this space today. But to zoom in on one spot, I think it’s acknowledging current workforce laws are often meant to make Congress feel better about spending not that much money. The investment tends to be pointed away from jobs that pay well, where people are more likely to stick around and cover their bills—and not need as many government-funded services in the future.

At the same time, Congress spends a lot of time wondering aloud why this money doesn’t support better-paying jobs in fields it worries are understaffed. And it is more likely to chase convoluted bureaucratic larks than actually engage with why.

I feel like clinging to ASWA is clinging to an outdated way of thinking. A lot is going to be demanded of these systems in coming years due to AI job loss and new work requirements from the summer’s entitlement changes. It’s beyond time to try something else.

This week’s grants listings number: $6 billion.

I added several new state and private grantmakings. See you behind the paywall.