The problems the Trump workforce strategy is solving seem to have shifted. It makes it more challenging for states to get their bearings in a rather key moment for the American workforce.

The last couple times I’ve watched Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling talk federal workforce funding levels, it hasn’t seemed to go well.

In March, I was in a theater in Vegas when a recorded statement from him told increasingly frustrated workforce officials that the Administration needed on its side that Trump II wasn’t asking them to “do more with less.” That was pretty easily disproven by the previous year’s White House budget proposal and a new White House budget proposal published only a few days later, both of which asked states to do much more with much less.

Then, last month, Sonderling looked like he struggled with hard questions from Democrats and Republicans in the Senate on the proposed workforce funding cuts in the Trump Administration’s 2027 budget. Sonderling was there in part to sell “Make America Skilled Again,” a White House plan for rebooting and greatly reducing American workforce spending via state-by-state block grants.

Ohio Republican Sen. John Husted told Sonderling he was confused as to why most of American workforce spending run by the Department of Labor needed to go away. A recent lieutenant governor, Husted suggested he thinks his home state uses its share pretty well.

“Right now, under the current system where it's a lot of the [Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act] programs, this money is going into specific to states [sic] being used for specific programs,” Sonderling said in response. “A lot of states don't necessarily need those programs or have the workers and it's money they can't spend.”

Where Sonderling looked flustered was in an exchange with Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who was a tad more direct in pointing out that there is more than a little missing logic in the Administration’s proposal to further drive down underfunded American workforce spending while expanding non-college training options.

“We're eliminating some of the programs and then allowing the states to design the program [as] opposed to shoveling the money into one silo where the states can get that money but may not have the workers and it advantages other states that have [them],” Sonderling said. “We want states like Connecticut to be able to make those investments, specifically to your workforce.”

I found myself circling back to these comments last week for a couple of reasons. One, I’ve spent quite a bit of the spring out in the states and talking with state workforce leaders. They find themselves perplexed by mixed messages from Trump II, which has been concerningly and about the progress of the parts of its workforce plans that had excited a decent number of those officials not too long ago.

Two, as the person whose job less than two years ago was understanding and tracking the spending of every DOL workforce program that would be killed off by MASA, I have no clue what Sonderling is talking about here. That’s not because I’m being obtuse or I’m endlessly deferential to the existence of DOL workforce programs exactly as they are now, which are often legislated into phone booths by the Hill in terms of what they can serve and who they can serve.

But to understand why, here’s a sampling of the programs that DOL would kill off and purportedly “replace” with MASA.

As I understand Sonderling’s argument, the problem is states are struggling to find all of the kinds of workers served by these programs and that’s why these programs should no longer exist. Absent some new information about, say, South Dakota to which I’m not privy, that seems hard to believe. Rather, most of what I hear from states is the opposite: the problem isn’t that there are too few workers to tap the funds, it’s that there are too few funds to serve all the workers they have eligible.

That problem certainly isn’t helped by cutting the living hell out of the workforce spending states get, something that the MASA plan would do. Both Murphy and Husted—not exactly a Democratic Socialist Never Trumper—tried pointing that out.

And if the concern is about “shoveling the money into one silo,” then, you know, killing all the workforce programs and merging the money into one block grant that may or may not fit states’ needs probably ain’t gonna fix it.

Because it has to be said in the current political environment: my point here is not to just be a jerk to the Republican Party or say everything that the Trump Administration does is crap. Rather, like I said, I’ve spent a lot of the spring on the road talking to the folks who do the work of workforce—red and blue. Something I’ve noticed in my travel is how much time I spend validating to folks across the spectrum that they’re not crazy and that what Washington leaders are saying is inconsistent. This is a big part of the problem facing American workforce strategy at present.

Case in point, Sonderling’s comments don’t really match the Trump workforce blueprint. They also don’t really match the White House’s pitch for MASA, which argued that states’ lives would be simpler by not having to apply for money, but not that there’s a shortage of workers to fill programs.

While I know some of those officials agree with Sonderling that they could do a better job designing their own programs, I think they—like Murphy and Husted—are struggling to sort why MASA—a particularly D.C. thinktank strategy for this area—actually fits the problems they’re seeing on the ground.

That’s not good for a wide variety of reasons because, well, even if the past few job reports have been better than expected, there’s still a lot of anxiety out there about AI-related job loss that I can’t say is misplaced given investor priorities. Coherency would greatly help by reducing the number of things folks in the field have to account for, and constructively, so would less talking at state and local officials who actually do the work of workforce, something I’ve heard complained about a lot lately.

Well, if I were Trump II, I would try to stick to one explanation and one strategy for what it's doing. That has seemed to be a challenge given the conceptual gaps between the agency-led workforce blueprint and the MASA plan. And whatever Sonderling said last month.

I suspect they’ll get a boost in a few weeks when they make some high-profile workforce funding, including who will run $145 million in funds paying employers to hire and train apprentices. That funding briefly goosed the vibes on Trump II six months ago.¹ But the government will need to keep doing workforce stuff after that, and to my surprise, I’ve heard more skepticism of late about whether Trump II’s pay-to-train strategy is overdoing a good idea. It will need to keep selling the plan, something it very clearly hasn’t done on MASA, which a year ago had more liberals interested in it than you might think.

Quite frequently these days, state and local leaders ask me how to deal with all the confusing stuff coming out of D.C. My answer is (1) don’t sugarcoat what you’re telling Washington because it does you far less good than you might think in Trump II and (2) focus on a strength D.C. policymakers really don’t have, which is that the workers and employers they’re serving aren’t theoretical to them, they’re people they know. They can talk to them, assess their needs, and see if it works in fairly real time.

Legislated into a phone booth as they may be, America’s workforce programs offer a lot of canvas for addressing those issues. The amount of money definitely won’t get better—and likely won’t before 2029 at the earliest, to be blunt about the current state of the Republican Party’s thinking on workforce.

But amid chaos, what you do with it can be better honed to fix real people’s problems, not theoretical ones. That’s the direction I would go.

A quick heads up: only THE MONEY and grants listing the week before July 4th. Summer may also be a hair quieter at times as I get out from under my move, but programming will continue apace.

I’m back again tomorrow with THE MONEY, where I’ll have a couple more thoughts on this week’s House spending bill as well as something that stuck out to me in the new White House guidance for grantmaking.