The Trump Administration has tried to “politicize” grantmaking, but it’s already a political tool. It’s just one that needs to be used better, including by telling people it’s being used at all.

A few weeks ago, I had a question: do voters actually know about big workforce grant awards?

As I’ve documented in recent Thursday editions, the Trump Administration has announced more than $200 million in workforce training grant awards in the past month. A decent number of these grant projects will be in congressional battleground states. Because the Trump White House almost openly invites this sort of thing (more on that in a second), I’ve heard persistent suspicion over the entirety of this Administration that grant dollars were going to deliberately end up in places that had a lot of importance in these midterms.

As someone who’s built and lawyered grants, I remain skeptical of that in the most general terms. There’s only so much you can control whether, say, someone in a state actually submits a fundable project on time. But every election is a workforce election, especially an affordability election like this one.

So it’s not inconceivable voters might be movable by the Administration’s investment in projects that create more apprenticeships and help employers retrain workers instead of laying them off. They do have to know about them, though.

So, a few weeks ago, I asked my Robot Research Assistant to start tracking whether there was any local news coverage of these grants, including mentions on social media. It’s imperfect, but it gives a rough idea of what voters are and aren’t seeing about these awards.

Here’s what my Robot Research Assistant found:

Or to sum this all up: if you were expecting control of Congress to turn on whether a state got a Trump II Rapid Reskill Dislocated Worker Grant, I regret to inform you that most voters in those states likely don’t know about that or any other funding the Administration has routed toward workforce.

Of course, as I was putting this together, Republicans did abruptly talk up a big workforce funding award in one maybe battleground state. On Friday, the President broke from his… unique midterm closing argument to make an “announcement” in Florida:

The Department of Labor providing this award, alone, isn’t news. DOL awarded Florida $40 million for apprenticeship more than four months ago, based on grant records. Here’s Florida’s announcement of it from July.

The award also is not for workers in the state, but for the state government to pay incentives to employers nationwide to hire apprentices into shipbuilding and the defense industry.¹ (The Administration did announce on Monday that employers could begin applying for these incentives, so I do wonder if this was a clumsy way of getting that news out.) And if it was a big deal to Florida voters, I suspect it’s the type of thing the GOP probably would’ve wanted them to know about sooner in a state where Republicans are “white-knuckled” over early voting figures.

Which gets me to my broader point: grantmaking is, and always has been, a political tool. It’s just been a very badly deployed one. By both parties.

And that inability to politically leverage grantmaking is likely holding back both the quality of publicly funded workforce projects and their ability to get meaningful stuff done.

Let’s first draw some sturdy conceptual lines between what I mean by grants being a political tool and the recent efforts to “politicize” grant awards.

The Trump White House is trying to “politicize” grantmaking with it’s proposed grant awards rule. That rule, a technical trainwreck that will be hard to enforce if it’s not killed by a court first, is on hold until after the midterms due language in a short-term budget patch passed after Congress returned from summer recess.

Based on the White House’s justification of the rule in an August 2025 executive order, its intent seems to be creating scenarios where Trump II political appointees can burst into the room to stop agency staff from funding purportedly liberal projects and instead give that money to conservative groups, who the White House thinks aren’t getting funded now.

There are a lot of flaws with that premise, including that conservative groups generally don’t like government spending and might have an easier time snagging cash from private donations with far fewer restrictions than federal grants. But most importantly, it misses that it’s far more productive for Administration leaders to build grant competitions and shape policy design to make sure the money ends up spent on the things they want funded.

f that sounds nefarious to you, it’s really not—it’s American government. What you’re voting for in a presidential election is a group of people who will run the executive branch a certain way. Spending money toward certain policies in certain ways is a big part of what the executive branch does.

It’s also an area where Trump II doesn’t seem to spend much time, as I’ve seen several grants this year that aren’t assembled at all in a way to do the thing written on the side of the tin.

That said, designing the dollars to end up toward your big priorities is only half the work here. I think a lot about a quote from President Biden I first read around a week before the 2024 election:

Several months prior, researchers at the Center for American Progress had written about the profound impacts of federal investments in a Ford facility near a small town called Brownsville, Tennessee. It’s in an area of West Tennessee where I was a reporter in my early twenties, and I can tell you that the investments have rewired the prospects of the community for the better.

Yet, the CAP researchers found something that I learned myself in 2024 while trying to track down the results of good jobs investments in Tennessee, Arizona, Michigan, Alabama, and a mess of other states: the workers who benefited the most often had no clue that the government was involved at all.

From the CAP report:

Constructively, this was a recurring issue in the Biden Administration, as well as the Harris campaign, which didn’t exactly frontload in its campaign materials the billions the Biden Administration spent to improve access to good jobs. Yet, this is far from a Biden-Harris problem. In the two years I’ve been outside of government, I’ve heard time and again about how political leaders and policymakers are reluctant, if not afraid, to tell people about spending money on workforce projects.

Sometimes that might be for good reasons—well, sort of. For example, I know of at least a couple of Republican states that I suspect don’t promote their job quality work so they can keep doing it. To exaggerate things mildly, they don’t want State Rep. Kneejerk Partisan, R-Yellsalot, to call the governor to complain about a communist plot to socialize publicly funded workforce training, or whatever.

Sometimes, it’s about hangups. I’ve talked with Trump appointees in the past about their reluctance to promote grant projects that further their agenda because they’re so flatly against most federal spending of taxpayer dollars. Even if it harms their own political agenda not to tell people about how they’re spending money on their political agenda.

Other times, folks seem to be chasing ghosts. I’ve been told, stone-faced and solemnly, that some program or another can’t be publicized because x stakeholder is pissed the program exists or y employer group will be furious about the direction of the project. A couple times I’ve talked to groups who supposedly prompted careful tiptoeing around eggshells only to find that those groups were—sincerely—full-throated supporters of whatever thing they were thought to hate in apocalyptic terms.

But very frequently, it’s because political leaders or their teams don’t understand how most people learn about their policy efforts and decisions. Some leaders assume that just because someone emailed out a press release, people will just know about the thing. Or they assume the right people will find out because they emailed it out to a dusty listserv of state workforce leaders. Or they assume that it’s 1995 and emailing stuff to a newspaper or a TV station means someone will cover it because they have space to fill.

In other words, it went out to somebody, so maybe it’ll reach the right people on the ground.

Eventually.

Maybe.

Let’s first talk about why we would want workforce grantmaking to be a more effectively used political tool, particularly given the Trump Administration’s counterproductive relationship with the concept.

First, as someone whose mailbox here in Michigan has been overflowing the past two weeks with mailers mostly attacking one Senate candidate, I understand that the ways people win elections aren’t exactly built on constructive notions of policy or changing things for the better.

However, I’ve seen elected leaders do awfully well in the past if they’re able to point to something they promised and show that they’ve delivered it. I’m also watching a second consecutive administration struggle to explain how it’s trying to dull the impacts of an economy everyone thinks sucks. If you’re an elected leader trying to keep your political power, it would likely help to be able to say, in plain and simple terms, “We spent money on this thing and it’s going to create better jobs for you.”

Second, big spasms of political will are the only way we get big things done in workforce. Politics doesn’t take workforce seriously because Politics thinks it’s too complicated and niche, despite the importance of a job in the United States. Politics also likes new toys that The Other Politics hasn’t used terribly well.

Therefore, giving Politics a mountain of “We created jobs stuff!” material is good for building up workforce policy in the United States. Separately, when it comes campaign time again, it lets Politics do the thing that Politics doesn’t always do well: keep track of what it promised the first time around and show that Politics delivered.

Third, that attention comes with a price that Politics might not like, but government reformers really should: attention and expectations. I’ve seen low expectations for this work persist because leaders assume no one will pay attention anyway—or that simply saying something is happening will be enough. The right attention and the right expectations make it harder for projects to fall into that rut.

Granted, I’ve also seen excessive attention drive project decisionmakers to do the safe thing, not the best thing. That could happen, of course—but workforce already is buried by people doing the safe thing. It needs sunlight and eyeballs to create better accountability.

Or, to put all this complex policy thought into a slimmer and tidier package: we need political will to make workforce better, and if we make workforce grantmaking a more effective political tool, it helps build up that will.

Oh, and it helps workers and employers know about services they might want to take advantage of. That too.

So how do we do that? One is by building better products that actually impact the issues elected leaders say they’re impacting—but again that is only half the battle. Building up political support for a good policy thing involves actually telling people that you’ve done a good policy thing.

On that front, there’s an exceptional role model for how to do this, albeit not one that Republicans and establishment Democrats are aching to talk about in positive terms.

Look, if all you think about Mayor Zohran Mamdani is that he’s the scary socialist mayor of New York, you’re missing one of the best blends of policy and communications I’ve ever seen out of any elected leader’s team.

They make so many videos like this that not only make elected leadership feel more accessible, but also explain policy calls in a plain, engaging way that always seems to come back to how they’re fulfilling promises from the Mayor’s campaign.

Additionally, they’ve used strategies that help get the word out in ways that adapt to how people get information now. As a former reporter, I understand why that’s been controversial with the press. As a former policymaker who’s had to pitch the press on covering my work, I also see how this approach make sure info gets to the ground even if it runs into one of the more arbitrary barriers to constituents finding out about government services that actually help them: The News Editor Who Says Everything Seems Like It’s Too Technical or Not Interesting Enough to Our Readers.

Again, every election is a workforce election. We have the tools to build things that could actually get workers the jobs and economic stability that are front of mind when they cast their ballots. Elected leaders can use the workforce policy to deliver on that front and build up this space in the process.

But we actually have to build it—and we need to tell people about it when we do.

Last year, I started wearing my own branded swag to conventions to get the company’s name out there. When you start a company, they let you do things like that. It’s in a pamphlet.

Not too long after I started doing that, people asked how they can buy their own. And some of y’all really like the shirt that says it’s stackable and portable—although it is not a shortcut to getting eligible for Workforce Pell.

Well, today I finally have an answer to the “How can I get my own shirt?” question: the new JOBS THAT WORK merch shop.

Right now, the shop features just the classic JTW logo. But we’ll be adding more designs soon—one of the great many exciting things being planned here at JTW headquarters.

Including that T-shirt that is stackable and portable.

Then again, aren’t they all?