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

The next 26 days could say a lot about where Trump II’s workforce plans are headed.

A big chunk of federal workforce spending expires on June 30, including the cash for the closely-watched Department of Labor competition to run funds paying employers to hire apprentices. That award, I suspect, will be closer to the end of the month, as will another closely watched competition to serve as DOL’s go-to organization in figuring out what the terms AI and apprenticeship mean when they are put together. Separately, we’re also awaiting the winners of a competition to operate YouthBuild programs where the Administration overpromised on its AI components and a wobbly mash-up of its programs for returning prisoners and justice-involved youth.

There is a lot of complaining about those competitions—particularly the unfocused and overcomplicated rules applying to the apprenticeship pay-to-train funds—but my understanding is there likely will be a decent number of pretty quality applicants. The question, then, is if the Trump Administration can stick the landing at a time when it is doing a whole lot more telling than showing that its overly pugilistic approach to workforce reform can actually reap results.

That is where there is plenty of uneasiness. The two apprenticeship competitions are ones that the Administration will closely manage. The AI one is a contracting arrangement, and the pay-to-train funds will be cooperative agreements, a type of award that federal law quite literally defines as one where the government is more involved than a grant, but not as much as a contract. (Law is fun!) Things are fluid in Trump administrations and often with an amount of urgency and emotion that can give you whiplash.

That means that precisely what these organizations are doing, and the timeline for it to prove it successful, likely will change often. I suspect the winner of the AI contract will end up having to do a great deal of gapfilling and rapid readjustment of that gapfilling as it brushes up against the edges of what’s an acceptable approach to AI at that moment.

Similarly, the Administration hasn’t really given folks a lot of reason to feel positive about its apprenticeship efforts (and yes, DOL still hasn’t updated the public-facing apprenticeship stats). Working backwards from the broad numbers DOL officials make in speeches suggests that the actual growth probably isn’t what you need to hit one million apprentices. The organizations that take on the pay-to-train funds will probably find themselves under immense pressure to help the Administration hit that mark, particularly since the White House expects many, many more apprentices than what we have at the moment—and soon.

We also have a lot of money still coming that could have some Big Political Feelings attached to it at a time when Senate Republicans are feeling feisty. Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, worked last year to preserve and add money to the Workforce Opportunity in Rural Communities grants, which Trump II puzzlingly didn’t solicit in 2025. Separately, Collins also has been a backer of DOL’s Women’s Bureau, which Trump II has sought to eliminate, the agency operating the Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations program, which Trump II unsuccessfully tried killing last year before resurrecting it in a quietly awarded competition in July 2025.

And not to diminish the endless stream of DOL-ified Education grants coming out, but we’ve not seen a true DOL workforce funding opportunity since the departure of Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. Stuff like that can slow down in a big transition. If Acting Secretary Keith Sonderling’s crew is going to make any substantial changes now that they’ve been elevated, it will be interesting to see what they are.