You're working the wrong job, the Trump Administration thinks.

The MAGA jobs thinking that insists longtime office workers need factory jobs and mines, and its potential congressional consequences.

The issue.

Too many Americans are working office jobs, not factory or trades jobs, according to the Trump Administration and its allies. They have some ideas for fixing that.

Explain.

Over the past few months, I have seen a trend emerge in how the Trump Administration and its allies think about work, college, and everything between.

Here’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent a few weeks ago on federal layoffs:

On the other side, we are shedding excess labor in the federal government . . . That will give us the labor that we need for the new manufacturing.

And Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick:

And Lutnick again:

You may have taken these comments as Rich Trump Dudes Just Sayin’ Stuff—and yeah, there’s an element of that—but there are MAGA throughlines here that have shown up in things like the White House materials promoting last month’s executive orders promoting “re-industrialization” and discouraging “college for all.”

It fits with the description of “low productivity” or “not real” federal jobs by DOGE and DOGE allies on the Hill. It’s also echoed by folks in MAGA digital hangouts, where posters fantasize about the bygone era of the 1950s with big hopes that tariffs will turn men away from competing with women in offices and, uh, raise fertility rates.¹

So what is the big idea? Well, here’s my attempt to put it into a few sentences:

Too many people have the wrong jobs, a lot of which are office jobs. We need those people to want to have the right ones. Which is in a factory, or a trade, or caring for children at home,² something like that. So we’ll change international trade and other policies to get them out of the wrong jobs and make it so they have to have the right jobs.

There are a few problems with that. For one, people might not want to switch jobs that they already decided they didn’t want years ago. In fact, these people might tell you, “Go to hell, I like being an actuary.”

To the extent this counterpoint has been anticipated, the MAGA belief seems to be that people won’t have a choice because of—to quote a tweet I link to above—"tariffs and DOGE.” In other words: because there will be less money to go around, companies will be forced to kill and cut jobs that we think aren’t the right kind, then people will be forced to do the jobs we want them to do.

One particular problem with that thinking? Inertia.

Even in the event of job cuts, the most likely landing spot for those former office workers would be another office job. When they were younger, did fealty to “college for all” mean some of these workers never received a full accounting of the opportunities available to them in—to pick one sector—manufacturing? Absolutely, and that’s a problem. But based on the information they did have, they still decided not to work in factories. If they lose their job after years of working in an office, their first instinct probably won’t be, “I was wrong. I need to find a lathe.”

Part of the reason why they won’t immediately think of the lathe life is that losing one office job doesn’t mean the alternative has to be The Mines. 2025 isn’t 1950, when there were 106 million fewer people in the labor force and significantly fewer sectors of office jobs.

In 2025, for example, there is a shortage of accountants and auditors. AI probably will kill some of accounting jobs over time, but it also could make it easier for existing office workers in related fields to get into the field. It’s much easier for someone who is an analyst of something to imagine themselves as an accountant than as a lathesman. Not to mention that if these layoffs happen in the near future, office jobs are much more likely to be immediately available to laid-off workers than still-theoretical manufacturing jobs planned to be reshored to the United States.³

All this may seem like quibbling with messaging. But in between justifying cuts using the word “woke,” the President’s skinny budget and recent executive orders definitely reflected some of these ideas. In this administration, that should be treated like a statement of immediate intent, even if the pieces don’t fit together.

The money for any Administration intent comes from Congress, where leaders are trying to square Trump concepts like “Get these people out of offices and into hard hats” and the Trump desire for cuts. I like to tell people that policy ultimately is the story decisionmakers tell to explain why something happens or doesn’t happen. An enticing couple of stories for people making cuts in Congress is that too many people go to college and federal workforce programs are “inefficient” because they’re focused on getting the wrong people to the wrong jobs.⁴

As I understand the point where these stories intertwine, the thinking is that low-income people prioritized by workforce programs now—often by federal law—need much more help than the federal government can afford to spend on them. It would be “easier” to instead retrain more incumbent, or already employed, workers—including college-educated office workers—who could see job loss due to AI, as well as students who might be deterred from college if there isn’t readily available financial aid.

In other words, the belief is Congress can OK Trump cuts, spend less, and get more by focusing its investment a rung or two up the socioeconomic ladder.

There is much for workforce practitioners to find infuriating in the above ideas, not the least of which is how it excuses the bad results of Congress half-assing workforce spending to allow for a more austere, quarter-assed approach. But in light of the MAGA desire to push people out of offices to recreate the 1950s, the one I think merits the most attention is workforce development focused on career swapping is hard no matter what rung of society you’re aiming the money.

Learning a new gig while working your job isn’t easy. Think of my first newsletter where I talked about Kimberly, a graduate of the (effectively now discontinued) Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations program. She told me that doing both meant at one point she was “going on empty, physically, spiritually, emotionally.”

One of the things that helped Kimberly get over the hump was federal support for the cost of getting to class and buying groceries. There would be much less available for that type of support in training programs after Trump spending cuts, even if it might be needed as an incentive to lure already-employed workers who don’t see an immediate threat to their jobs. Those workers might be turned off by offtime training that requires childcare, something already hard to find that Trump cuts could make even harder to find to encourage more stay-at-home parents.⁵

Meanwhile, the “harder” or “inefficient” population of workers—which likely would be much more willing to take factory jobs than office workers⁶—would continue to exist with fewer or no resources that give them an opportunity to get ahead.

What do we do about it?

Which comes to the ultimate problem here, exemplified in the clips above and comments of MAGA tweet bros: we’re talking about major, possibly traumatic changes to the American economy based on magical thinking that breezes through concepts like “implementation” and “how people work.”

I don’t think those ideas can be negotiated with at this stage, especially not with the Administration or the House. I also think many workforce providers’ usual stories for policymakers—about people with hard lives whom programs helped get ahead—won’t resonate this time. Those are the stories that keep me going, but to tell a hard truth, there are elected leaders who read the last election as proof they don’t need to care about those populations anymore or that they can’t care because it looks “woke.”

But as you might have gathered above, many of these ideas about “real jobs” and “efficient” training don’t stand up at Step 2 of implementation, let alone Step 1.2. Accordingly, what I think could help is education and advocacy with the Senate focused on how there are very few easy outs in workforce training. Lawmakers very much struggle with the particulars of workforce based on recent hearings, and if I was directing cold water to the place it could be most useful, it would be in the Senate’s general direction.

Card subject to change.

Well, that was an uplifting newsletter, wasn’t it?

LATER THIS WEEK: I’ll have something on stuff lurking in another Trump executive order, like the reappearance of something that sure sounds like Industry-Recognized Apprenticeship Programs, the failed Trump I attempt to privatize Registered Apprenticeship.

FRIDAY: New pieces that don’t line up in the Trump workforce plans and predictions on where a few more programs might end up when all is said and done.

NEXT TUESDAY: Oh dang, I’m talking about apprenticeship again.

1. Sure, dude.

2. The New York Times’ Monday story about tax credits and GOP plans to get more parents to stay at home gets at something I have known about for quite a while, but has really emerged in recent Trump priorities and cuts on spending. As I talked about last week on the effective elimination of the Women’s Bureau, there is a belief inside certain Trumpworld circles that if the federal government doesn’t fund programs on certain things, the things will go away.

One of those things, apparently? The idea that if the government cut programs that help women get jobs, women will stop wanting to get many jobs. This misunderstands the beneficiaries of these programs, which includes employers who have greater access to talent now that their hiring and training processes no longer omit half of the human race.

3. Trump has announced more than 200,000 new manufacturing jobs. As someone who worked on Biden-Harris jobs policy, I can say with some pain that new manufacturing jobs can take a little bit of time to come online. Not just because of regulatory hurdles, but because of the complex movements of capital, materials, and people needed to create those massive new installations and get them running.

4. Congress, as it examines a bodies-and-paper workforce statute with overburdensome performance reporting and a constant need to move participants to the door:

5. Based on the Times story on Monday, tax credits to stay at home seem to be the new childcare solution/baby motivator. Yet, tax credits are a lagging incentive—something many Americans don’t think about but for one time of year. In other words, I’m doubtful tax credits will have a husband bursting through the front door to say, “Honey, you don’t need to go in tomorrow. There’s a possibility that we might qualify for a $5,000 reduction of our tax liability next April, provided we stay below certain allowable income thresholds!”

You know what could motivate a parent to stay home? A $5,000 monthly subsidy, which honestly could reduce the childcare crisis too if routed that direction. But Republicans in the congressional majority don’t have the policy operating system to accommodate that option.

6. Some of whom may actually have the skills to get these jobs now too, but can’t because of badly designed hiring processes, lack of access to resources like transportation and childcare, and unlawful discrimination.