The current politics of workforce is caught up in a fairytale idea where business can magically business workforce programs to success. That’s probably not going to work.

Here's something I've heard between the lines—and sometimes explicitly—from businesspeople who touch workforce development and education: they seem tired, of late, of one party's political staffers and their misunderstood, primary-colors ideas of what business does and what it's like. They think it’s a barrier to actually getting things done with employers in this space.

They’re talking about Republicans, not Democrats. Yes, even in a world where the odd megasized gas station CEO says that blue states couldn’t possibly accommodate his company’s kolache-serving ways.

The issue is with what I call the Fairytale Idea of Business because it’s wrapped up in a lot of magical thinking. In short, it’s a phenomenon where policymakers and political decisionmakers—particularly those whose understanding of the world is more ideological than practical—effectively just say “Business” as both the policy call and the plan for implementing it.

How do we make workforce programs better? Business.

How do we actually get people hired after they complete training? Business.

How do we keep bears from attacking our campsite? Business.

It’s definitely a bigger issue in Republican administrations, even if it’s not endemic to them. The problem with this thinking is that business leaders—even when they love the political deference and adulation—tend not to think Fixing All of Workforce and Hiring through the Power of Business in the United States is one of their KPIs. They also can feel like this is just political leaders’ way of passing the buck on things they’re not responsible for, like public workforce funding programs.

At the same time, there logically is a place where workforce needs business leaders to pick up the baton and run with it—particularly if they’re going to be noisy about the results. Business leaders do talk a lot about workforce development and education and want more public dollars for it—and a bigger say in how they’re spent.

A necessary condition to successfully ensuring those government dollars train for what businesses are hiring for is for businesses to tell government what it’s hiring for. Some workforce programs will tell you it can be hard to get business leaders and employers to return their calls or get useful input even when they are nominally involved.

If the situation seems complex and contradictory, well, it is. It’s not something that can be reduced to complaining that bureaucrats just need to listen to business or that the whole enterprise should be handed off to employers because business can fix everything.

Unfortunately, that thinking is hardwired into how a lot of America’s key workforce structures are built—and it definitely does seem to be a driver of how workforce policy will be sorted in the near future.

It’s important to step back and understand how hardwired magical thinking about business and workforce is built into the policy in this space. As in many cases, that involves a journey into the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, the law that provides America’s most consistent source of workforce funding—and a statute that Republican members of Congress played a greater role in shaping than you might think from how they talk about it.

The vast majority of Congress’s WIOA spending ultimately ends up in state and local hands. How the cash gets spent is supposed to be decided by appointed boards described in the statute, using an approach that actually predates WIOA. In describing the setup for local boards—the ones closest to the people who will benefit from the money—WIOA says that “a majority of the members of each local board shall be representatives of business,” including “owners of businesses, chief executives or operating officers of businesses, or other business executives or employers with optimum policymaking or hiring authority.”

If that’s not business-y enough for you, the law says that these appointees should "represent[] businesses . . . that provide employment opportunities that, at a minimum, include high-quality, work-relevant training . . . in in-demand industry sectors” and must be nominated by business.

To put a finer point on this: by law, the most business-y of businesspeople must have the greatest say in how much of America’s most consistent source of workforce money gets spent. In reality, business leaders think this law really sucks at workforce training and ensuring business has a say in it.

If that seems paradoxical, think about this: even if the business-y businesspeople are on a board, that doesn’t mean they’re the right businesspeople in industries that really are hiring. Or that they’ll have the knowhow for shifting the money in the right business-y direction. Or that they'll show up, for that matter—since businesspeople don't make their livings from helping shape workforce policy but, you know, doing business.

In other words, it’s a very hopeful and broadbrush solution to a nuanced problem. It overassumes what businesspeople can bring to workforce just by being businesspeople who might be at a standing meeting.

So far, it does seem like the Trump Administration is doubling down on this approach to workforce, even when intent seems to be in the right place. The Trump workforce blueprint has a lot to say about business and employers’ role in workforce training, much of which I gather is more aspirational than actionable. It says employers need to “play a central role” in nudging workforce dollars in directions that actually get workers hired—something that’s definitely not wrong.

Yet, when I look under the hood of the workforce funding the Administration has the greatest latitude to shape, I don’t really see that happening. Many of the projects solicited by the Administration are the big fuzzy public-private partnerships that have been a staple of federal workforce funding since I've been in this space. And businesses have voiced concerns that suggest they don’t think some of the Administration’s more novel workforce spending initiatives are reflecting their thoughts.

The Administration, like Congress, also seems stuck doing more of what came before. Late last year, the Administration roundaboutly invited states to ask it to bless throwing non-business representatives off workforce boards. Because if a business-y business majority can’t get the job done to business’ satisfaction, presumably an all-business board will?

If it’s not clear, the current system’s approach isn't the best for actually getting business involved in ways that help workforce programs be successful. It’s too broad and overassumes that someone who works in business actually knows how to shape training programs so that businesses will hire workers coming from them.

What we likely need is an approach that’s more tailored to individual sectors—shaping solutions that work in that sector instead of taking a broad approach and hoping you can tailor it to fit a sector. That approach—one popular overseas that I know smart folks are working on here in the U.S.—actually gives businesses a clearer and more direct way of weighing in on workforce programs than just asking them to show up and do business things.

That’s something the Administration actually has significant leeway to build without legislative change through some of its more flexible grant funding. Based on what we've seen so far, I would say a meaningful shift in that direction is unlikely this term.

I haven’t seen anything out of Trump II that suggests it will move beyond skittishness that seems deeply layered into the politics of workforce development. Those politics tend to favor those fuzzy public-private partnership projects—ones more likely to allow projects to pick from seven sectors instead of honing in on one. Case in point: even when Trump II picked a clear strategy—paying employers to hire workers into apprenticeships—it tried melding three sectors (semiconductor production, data centers construction, and nuclear power) into one.

In lieu of help (or change) from the top, that leaves the folks who do the work of workforce to figure out how to actually bring business to the table in a productive way that's worth business’s time and their own.

To that end, the training programs that tend to be most successful here—in that they actually get people hired through business’s input—focus more on relationships, not building policy mechanisms that have businesspeople tell non-businesspeople their business stuff.

Those programs spend a lot of time researching businesses to make sure they’re actually open to investing in workforce development—not just complaining about not finding qualified talent. They build their engagement with them in ways that actually keep the businesses engaged. They also keep close track of whether their graduates actually get hired, and use those carefully forged relationships to ask why and figure out what needs changing.

That’s a lot more work than bringing business into the conversation and hoping everything will work out. But that’s because it’s real life, not a fairytale.