You could argue that the title for this newsletter could have been “Man, Congress just doesn’t get that we need more workforce funding and that the current federal workforce programs need a heck of a renovation.” It doesn’t fit as neatly into a logo or a URL as JOBS THAT WORK, but you could argue that.
Last week, Congress proved that alternative title right by introducing a new workforce bill that, in my opinion, largely perpetuates the problems of America’s most consistent source of workforce dollars, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. The problems with the new WIOA redo—called the A Stronger Worker for America Act of 2026—include that it doesn’t look like it will come with a lot of new funding and it perpetuates the things that eat too much of WIOA’s cash now without helping workers or employers.
At the same time, the Trump White House wants to spend dramatically less on workforce, re-upping its call to eliminate WIOA programs and replace them with a reduced, state-by-state block grant program called “Make America Skilled Again.” That effort struggled to gain traction in 2025 and is unlikely to move forward this year, so leaders at the Department of Labor have focused on trying to waive provisions of WIOA states are struggling with—an anti-bureaucracy effort that was doing a bit better a few weeks ago than it might be now.
At the same time all this is happening, the National Skills Coalition, an organization I think a great deal of, has launched “A New Promise of Work,” a campaign meant to stir “first-choice investment” in workers, workforce development, and the economy ahead of “a forward-looking national workforce policy agenda” it has planned for 2027. It’s a much-needed effort, to say the least.
Last week, I talked to NSC’s Katie Spiker, who heads federal affairs at the organization. Below, we talk about the campaign and several of the big, hard questions facing workforce at this moment, including what it might take to get Congress to break its WIOA habit, whether the Trump block grant plan could be a solution (even if I don’t like it), and a whole lot more.
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An interview with Katie Spiker.
Katie Spiker is Chief of Federal Affairs at National Skills Coalition.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Nick Beadle: Folks probably know NSC if they’re reading this newsletter, but they may not know about your new campaign. Could you explain the campaign and how it might be different from what the organization has done in the past?
Katie Spiker: The first place to start is that the world, the economy, our workforce and labor market are in this pivotal moment right now both because we see the impact of AI and/or we don't exactly see the impact of AI. We just know that it'll be here. At the same time as we have this upheaval in the labor market both structurally and cyclically, we've got a lot of opportunity from a policy perspective right now to influence what the next generation of workforce economic development education policy looks like because of the elections of more than half of the governors this year and the midterms coming up.
Until policy steps in to level some of the playing fields, and make sure that communities have the resources in order to train people, [and] that businesses understand what the workforce pipeline is in their area, and that it's not on an individual to translate and jump between these different systems but the systems can make it easy for someone to do so, then we're living in this kind of slapshot strategy that is not actually going to pan out for opportunity and benefit for workers and businesses.
What we want to do with “A New Promise of Work” is create this forward-looking, field-developed [workforce] policy strategy that actually has the kind of policies in it that are bipartisan. Because people want to advocate for them and actively want policies, instead of it being an afterthought to legislation that is actually targeting something much bigger.
Nick: As someone who worked on good jobs in the last administration, I appreciate that “not an afterthought” piece quite a lot. Because a piece of the Good Jobs Initiative I worked on was definitely retrofitting what was actually a big jobs training project, but had to be infrastructure bills first.
A point of frustration I've written a lot about lately is that when I talk to people on the Hill, sometimes they're very frank with me that they really can’t get lawmakers to take this stuff seriously. I don’t necessarily hear that from governors’ offices who have to be closer to the ground.
So let me ask you the easiest question here—and I’m definitely being sarcastic about that—which is how do you get Congress to really care about this stuff in a way that workers do and more people closer to the ground do?
Katie: It's important that we understand that the workforce conversation that's happening now or that needs to happen now isn't a single conversation, right? We're actually talking about several different pieces of policy that need to be blended together with a strong backbone across the different pieces.
A lot of what the Biden Administration did with workforce was done as administrative implementation to the pieces that Congress passed. The first part of your question that I hear you focusing on is, like, “Let's get this in the legislative process so that there's money, so that there's alignment.”
It's not one conversation, it's six. The idea of training someone is only as good as their ability to stay in that training program and complete that training program and get a good job. All of those connections involve things across our human services run, administered, and funded by states across different funding streams. So, I think that's one of the biggest is just helping folks that are not embedded in these workforce conversations see the depth and breadth of where workforce is impacting the things that they care about the most.
At the heart of a whole lot of that is the amount of money that we as a country put into these programs. We invest less than every industrialized nation except for Mexico in supporting these policies. You can tell when we're at a moment like we are [in] right now that we have not invested in the things that are going to make and ensure that workers are nimble and that businesses can be responsive to these changes.
What we’re actually talking about needing is the response on the scale of the challenge we’re facing—both the challenge that workers are facing today around affordability and the ability to access and sustain the kind of training and jobs that support their families.
Moving beyond WIOA?
Nick: I made this joke in the newsletter this week that I’ve been making for a while, which is that you could talk about any workforce situation or challenge to Congress and what you get in return is “WIOA” or “WIOA with a Hat”…
Katie: I like “WIOA with a Hat.”
Nick: Yeah, that’s been my nickname for the A Stronger Workforce for America Act. In the new version of ASWA that Congress introduced last week, there are a couple passing references to AI-related job loss, but nothing that would be really different than what we can do now in WIOA.
How do we break Congress out of that WIOA loop? Because I talk to diminishingly fewer people who feel like, “We have to do WIOA,” but I have heard that people on the Hill do feel like, “We have to do WIOA.”
Katie: The first thing is we talk a lot about as workforce folks and at National Skills Coalition is of the importance of partnerships, of bringing together the people on the ground that are doing the work in different ways. The same thing needs to happen as we're thinking about federal policies. We need to be talking and working with basic needs advocates in order to be building the throughlines between the policies that are supporting people's ability to get food and keep housing and access child care to make sure that those align with and fit with folks’ workforce needs. So yes, it's about Washington and its ability to do the planning and alignment piece, but it's also about making sure that we're actually tracking, measuring, and asking the systems to drive towards the same outcomes.
Going back to the money, we're not just talking about underspending a little bit compared to other countries, right? We have a seismic difference between the amount of disruptions that are coming, the number of people who are today disconnected from being able to access jobs and training, and the amount of money that we're spending.
Similarly, the connection between education and workforce is a place where we need to modernize as well. As states are working to implement Workforce Pell right now, the siloed nature of the kind of data that we're tracking about people and the way that tracking is happening at the state level is really showing us that we need to be able to measure what's happening in a responsive way. If we're not collecting the full picture of data around workers’ participation, around the industries that they're going into, around the wages that they're earning, around their retention in jobs for time periods that look beyond the second and fourth quarter, then we're not getting the full picture of what's actually going on.
Where does the solution come from?
Nick: Are the Administration’s “Make America Skilled Again” block grants a solution? Based on the White House budget proposals, those grants let states choose their own adventure on workforce, but eliminate most of the DOL-side workforce programs and cut what states are getting from DOL now. Last year, I heard from liberals and folks who are pretty dark blue, politically, who would say, “I’m not actually opposed to this, I’m opposed to the dramatically lower dollar amount that the Administration proposed.”
That was fascinating to me. So, is the Administration on the right track in that way, or is something else happening here? I feel like MASA has twice now been dead on arrival.
Katie: The first thing about the [ASWA] reintroduction we saw last week that really changes the conversation from where we've been since its first introduction is that it's a Republican bill. In reality, in Congress, things are going to move when there's support from both parties. Things are going to be durable when there's support from both parties for workforce legislation. We've seen all of the significant economic policy happen on party line votes over the past two congresses, three congresses.
We've seen the actual significant policies pass through processes that haven't allowed a lot of robust policy language or explanation or digging into the way that systems work together because they've been passed under a process that is based around our budget. While those significant shifts have happened and money has been invested to places, it hasn't been through a process that's bringing both sides of the aisle together that is addressing the actual concerns that span policy priorities and political affiliations.
I think what the Make America Skilled Again grants and what policies like those that have been proposed under the one-door pieces really show us is states trying to solve the challenge of coordinating across disparate systems and incomplete data and outcome measures. To that effect, it's absolutely meeting or responding to a need that we hear all the time from our partners.
Workforce needs to be innately driven by what's happening on the ground and by what's happening in different states. The federal role should really be in supporting states to do what's going to be best for the workers in the state and the businesses that are trying to hire folks. I think the important part that Make America Skilled Again is uncovering is that desperate need for coordination and the fact that it looks different in different states and different areas. At the same time, we have not seen consolidation or block granting lead to [consistent and good] outcomes in other programs. That should be what we’re aiming for.
Nick: And inherent in the block grant strategy, typically, is that you’re cutting the money as you’re moving the program to a block grant. As we’ve talked about for a lot of this conversation, we already are underspending here. My friend David Fischer has done a really good job of late documenting this, too.
Katie: Absolutely. I haven’t updated this number, but we’re spending about half of what we did 20 years ago. It’s incomprehensible at a time in which work is going shift [dramatically] the way that it is.
Nick: Not to throw yet another hard question at you, but I’ll wrap this by asking you the question I get a lot right now from people out in the middle of the country: how should I be preparing for the moment ahead if I’m a workforce official? Or, how should I be preparing for this moment that’s ahead if I am somebody who is doing this work and relying on this money?
Katie: So, with my NSC hat on, I’m going to start by saying that I don’t have the answer to that right now. Where we’re going with “New Promise of Work” is that it’s not folks in D.C. that are going to answer that, right? It’s the people that are doing the work on the ground that are experiencing the changes themselves and the businesses that are hiring and thinking about what their pipeline and needs are.
Why we launched and are doing the work around “New Promise of Work” is to engage our networks [and] uncover what really would need to change about the public workforce system, about economic development in our country, and education in order to create a system that works for people. The people that know that best are the people that are going through that process.
The other answer that I would give around that work is that advocacy is always critical. Members of Congress understand issues about how people get jobs and move through the education process, either based on their own experiences, which quite often are through a more traditional path of education in a four-year degree, or because of the stories and things that they hear from their constituents. Constituents’ expertise comes from their experience, and policymakers both need to, and want to, hear that from folks.
As we are looking at these areas of opportunity and areas of challenge, I think that the best thing that workforce folks can be doing is using the resources that they've got and making sure that they're telling the story about where those resources are falling drastically behind what they actually need.
Hello, valued customer.
Out of necessity, it looks like I backed into something you really liked, which is splitting off the grants listings into their own Friday post just for paid subscribers. So we’re going to let that one stick most weeks going forward.
That does allow me a hair more space to give you a few newsier things extra, such as my own running tracker of what money you should be on the lookout for.
Elsewhere, I’m updating The Federal Funding Library this week to add a few more programs and flag ones that the White House has called for ending (again).
Card subject to change.
Thanks to Katie for a really deep conversation on where we are on workforce and federal spending. I can tell it’s a really good interview when I wrap up and think, “Crap, where do I cut this?” And that was very much the case today.
Speaking of workforce and federal spending, you might have noticed that last week was nothing but sound and fury signifying nothing. Even with a massive newsletter last Thursday, a few things slipped off the table last week that I’ll clean up this week in THE MONEY. I also will have some thoughts about what I’m seeing now that we have had a healthy dose of Ed-by-DOL dollars hit the street.