Welcome to this edition of JOBS THAT WORK: THE MONEY, a weekly rundown of the news and grant listings important for people who use money to get people to work, with exclusive intel and insights for paid subscribers.

News you should know about money and things getting people to work

After sending me texts about AI over the last week, Trump II’s back at it with AI and workforce again this week. The Department of Labor announced Wednesday that it is procuring a contract meant to “accelerate the integration of artificial intelligence skills into Registered Apprenticeship programs, marking a major step forward in preparing the American workforce for the jobs of the future.”

Trump II signaled this investment late last year in an informational notice to potential contractors. Interestingly, the dollar amount of the contract is not listed in the release, unusual for Trump II. Dollar amount matters because this is a pretty ambitious contract on something I’ve heard Trump II is struggling to get its arms around: how do you do AI stuff in apprenticeship, particularly with few true “AI jobs” out there?

DOL says the project will integrate AI into existing apprenticeship programs, build up AI-related fields in what sounds like a continuation of its “AI infrastructure” push, and “includ[e] AI in roles that directly build, manage, or apply AI technologies.” The solicitation also says that DOL intends for this contract to use Registered Apprenticeship to help expand AI literacy, a la the text-based course it announced last week.

DOL also signaled the winner of the contract will be an “intermediary,” or an organization that helps employers get into Registered Apprenticeship. Intermediaries seem to have been on the outs with Trump II, so this might be a positive development for them, even if it’s only one awardee for an unknown dollar amount with a lot of work behind it.

There is a question as to whether there might be more productive apprenticeship-related investments in AI. One of the bells that remains unrung is using AI to more quickly review applications for new programs and help them problem-solve what’s missing. AI also could be used to help employers and sponsors build out the guts of those applications and more speedily secure approvals, a missing piece in Trump II’s vision of pay-to-train incentives thoroughly goosing the number of apprentices in the United States.

My former DOL Good Jobs Initiative colleague Emlyn Bottomley—by far one of the most brilliant people I know on stats and public money—started his newsletter this week by opening up access to an amazing tool he’s put together tracking the current state of Biden infrastructure projects.

His topline numbers say a lot to me about why and where Trump II might be struggling with apprenticeship:

A lot of that money was tipped toward helping support Registered Apprenticeship, something I can confirm as one of the people who, like Emlyn, was on the phone several hours each week with the agencies that programmed it. I

t’s a complicated economic picture right now, and there are a lot of factors as to why apprenticeship appears to be slowing down. But all these holdups and wasted dollars definitely don’t help.

Next Wednesday is the deadline for comments on the Education Department rules implementing Workforce Pell. I continue to hear darkening expectations about the first few months of the program, which will provide grants traditionally provided to lower-income college students for at least eight-week-long workforce programs.

Here’s the short of the situation:

With that in mind, I’ve realized that I keep getting some version of the same three questions over the past month. Here they are and here are my answers for now.

One option Ed still has on the table here is defining “stackable” and “portable,” terms describing required features of Workforce Pell programs that Congress… did not define. Presumably, the terms together mean that the program is recognized as job-getting by multiple folks whose opinions matter on that thing (like employers!) and it can be assembled into a bigger, even cooler job-getting piece of paper if the student keeps going. Kind of like Credential Voltron.

In policymaking writ large, these are the kind of terms you want an expert agency to define in detail to avoid any confusion in implementation. And yet… Ed declined to define the terms in the proposed rulemaking.

Instead, it routed states to some dusty DOL guidance using the terms and suggesting they think about it while coming up with their own definition. Why? Ed argued it wanted its rules to be as close to WIOA’s in its implementing regulations as possible, and WIOA does not define these terms. This is the type of policy reasoning akin to buying a new car and ramming part of it into a light pole to match a caved-in bumper on your other car.

Ironically, Ed leaving it to states to define “portable” makes Workforce Pell credentials less portable by opening the possibility of slightly different ideas of what is “portable” across state lines. This also adds even more work on states struggling with the data and procedural lifts of Workforce Pell. If Ed wanted to offer a little more predictability to the product—which is what colleges and employers are looking for right now—and take a little off states’ plates to ease implementation, this would be a lovely layup in the final rule.