. . . where I had the pleasure Thursday of keynoting the Illinois Workforce Summit (which you can watch here), after spending some time in Hershey, Pa., on Tuesday night for the Pennsylvania Workforce Development Association’s conference. It was great to meet and share with so people doing the work, and I have learned a ton this trip.

I’m not done speaking for the spring, though. A couple more stops in the near future:

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

Last year, around now was when I started hearing from folks reliant on the Department of Labor’s Senior Community Service Employment Program that things seemed really off. The question is if we’re going to go through the theatre of trying to hold up this program’s money for a second year in a row, possibly because of Big Feelings at the White House. Reportedly, last year’s holdup left some older workers homeless. As of this writing, I don’t see the allotments for the year on DOL’s website.

For the uninitiated, SCSEP (pronounced “CEE-SEP”) funds temporary jobs at community service organizations to teach job skills to older workers that need to work but have barriers to employment. To simplify, DOL competes who operates these grants every four years—last competition in 2024—then determines specific allotments of money per state on an annual basis.

Typically, DOL announces those allotments around this time of the year. Every year is technically a new grant to the organizations, but it’s really hard to transition grantees midstream, legally and operationally. But last year, DOL didn’t start announcing allotments until June 30 and didn’t actually give out money to grantees until September 30. The money was tied up in an undefined review of money, along the same time as a chunk of Education Department funding that also usually becomes available on July 1. That meant organizations shut down services and furloughed workers, meaning they’re probably still recovering from the holdup even if the programs are running again. There was one report of an older worker living in a tent as a result of the SCSEP holdup.

There are valid criticisms of SCSEP, which by statute requires some lumbering and confusing hyper-bureaucracy to administer the program. The White House has not adopted those critiques. Instead it has argued the program is duplicative and doesn’t really increase their wages. The latter I will acknowledge to a degree, but also flag that SCSEP serves populations of older workers who usually can’t get help from other programs. Many of these older workers haven’t had barriers to employment for just a couple years, they’ve had them—and had them reinforced to them—for generations.

The White House budget office also has insisted the program must go away because its past awardees are under suspicion of woke. Two years in a row now, the budget office has lambasted Easterseals, the mostly beloved charity and a SCSEP grantee. The 2027 budget request complains that Easterseals—which helps kids with disabilities, adults with disabilities, and older adults “aims to advance ‘inclusion, diversity, equity and access,’ in the workplace.” The 2027 proposal also takes aim at CWI, another SCSEP grantee organizationally focused on helping older workers enter and stay in the workforce, for its efforts to battle “systemic ageism.”

If you read all that as complaining about these organizations, you know, doing things to help older workers get into workplaces they generally aren’t, I wouldn’t blame you. My read on last year’s situation was that the White House might have gone forward with trying to kill off these funds if there weren’t sturdy statutory provisions preventing it. Accordingly, if they try it again this year, it likely will just be theatre with severe consequences for older workers, many of whom support the Trump Administration.

If the holdup comes again, we’ll see if there are any lessons learned from 2025. I was told last year that SCSEP grantees were hesitant to flag their struggles for a few months last year in fear of retaliation. I think that was a misstep. Grantees lost the early, newsy outrage that helped restore Ed money much more quickly.

And if the White House needs to get this out of its system, hopefully they move through it fast enough that some older workers aren’t left unhoused again.