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Nick Beadle awareness
You can sign up here for Joy Coates’ and my Webinar on July 22 on The Nexus Method to skills-first hiring and apprenticeship.
Joy and I will also be presenting on September 16 at the National Association of State and Territorial Apprenticeship Directors’ annual conference in Lake George, New York. You can register here for the conference.
Joy and I will also be presenting at Shift Work Forward’s SHIFT Conference 2026 on September 24 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. You can sign up for the conference here.
Yeah, the apprenticeship numbers don’t look good.
This week, DOL updated the apprenticeship numbers it shares with the public.
In the winter, it showed it was quite a ways from the President’s big one million apprentices goal, with around 700,000 active apprentices.
This week’s update shows it is… still quite a ways from the President’s big apprenticeship goal, with 714,000 active apprentices.
I caution that this is a midyear update, and active apprentices vary because apprentices eventually graduate. At the same time, if you’re an Administration that has built much of its policy boat around creating apprenticeship growth, I wouldn’t say this looks good by any means.
For many folks, this update will confirm their suspicion that DOL didn’t update these numbers for a while because they looked bad. If you want good-ish news, the number of new apprentices enrolled in the system—at 215,000—is at a point where I could reasonably see the end number coming in higher last year’s, a backslide in new apprentice enrollment for the first time since the pandemic. That’s definitely possible given how unevenly new apprentice figures come into DOL’s data systems.
At the same time, that’s hardly a silver lining. Apprenticeship enrollments were on an upward trajectory in the Biden Administration. The Trump Administration has gutted the infrastructure and energy spending that helped support that lift. Two years of backsliding would signal that Trump policies have hurt apprenticeship’s overall growth more than they’ve helped.
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Situational awareness: Keith Sonderling’s Labor Secretary confirmation hearing is this morning.
At 10 a.m. EDT, to be precise.
My gut—which I caution remains a digestive organ, not a thinking one—tells me Sonderling probably isn’t in nearly as much danger as Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. I’m skeptical of how much primaried Republican senators are really going to hold up Trump nominees, but we’re finally starting to hear people acknowledge that “tossing out the people who keep voting for your things no matter what” might not have been a masterstroke of strategy on the President’s part.
Sonderling had a very easy confirmation hearing for deputy secretary last year. He didn’t have an easy hearing in May when he was questioned more aggressively by Senate Republican appropriators on the budget. That questioning included skepticism from Republican senators, who generally like block grants, on the White House’s undercooked workforce block grant plan that the White House hasn’t done much to sell to anybody.
There are more cracks in Sonderling’s reputation as a savvy leader than there were when he was seen as the stabilizer for the Department of Labor during the Lori Chavez-DeRemer scandals. He has seemed much less up on DOL’s workforce issues than I thought he’d be, and he seemed flustered on workforce funding questions in that May hearing. (Although given the White House’s troubled sell of the block grant plan, I’m leery of the talking points he was probably given that day.)
One last thing: if Sonderling gets confirmed, will Trump move to nominate a deputy? Trump administrations can stay light on appointees in jobs like deputy secretary, which vary in duties and roles from administration to administration in my experience. One fewer confirmed appointed leader is one fewer filter for DOL’s workforce funding, which is a bigger deal than you might think in terms of how this funding is shaped, and can lead to all sorts of quiet conflicts that affect what shows up in the dollars later.
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Bury me with my giant pile of regulatory comments.
Even with calls from Republican allies for a delay, the White House Office of Management and Budget insists that its messy new grants rules will go into effect by October 1. That got a little harder this week.
As of this morning, the rule received nearly half a million comments. That presents and nuts-and-bolts regulatory challenge that I haven’t really seen unpacked elsewhere, but could be quite consequential to whether this rule survives—and in what form.
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