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

House appropriators on Tuesday voted to advance a bill that would gut state workforce funding while also making curious, dink-and-dunk increases to national programs. Even after a handful of amendments, it remains a weird, unserious bill that runs contrary to a lot of what Republicans on the Hill have said this term, as I wrote on Tuesday.

And Democrats definitely spent a lot of Tuesday’s markup pointing out how odd this bill is given the current work- and economic-related anxieties in the United States.

“As inflation outpaces wage growth, and new technology upends the workforce, we ought to be investing in programs that support workers,” said Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, “not cutting funding and leaving them out to dry.”

I still think the chances of this spending plan becoming law are quite limited, particularly in an election year with key Senate Republicans worried about their chances. That being said, I came away from the markup more convinced that Republicans have really blown it on workforce while they have had a trifecta. There’s an urgent need to do something more in this space, and between a White House that’s limited in its options for engaging this work and a lack of clear legislative direction, that need hasn’t turned into action.

Workforce still isn’t taken nearly as seriously by the folks who shape political strategy at the national level—something that feels out of touch with most Americans’ worries at present. Accordingly, any advantage Dems have here will only be so good as they do anything with it, and the chances of their doing anything with it still seem frustratingly low. Which means we’re probably stuck here in Stuckland for a bit longer.

The Department of Education announced this week it had selected ten states for the next stage of a $15 million competition to build out more talent marketplaces that match the skills workers have with the skills employers say they need.

The states are Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Hawaiʻi, Massachusetts, Montana, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia. Alabama almost felt like a default here given that Ed has published guidance documents telling other states about Alabama’s well-publicized workforce and talent development efforts. The Administration also continues its fascinating interactions with Arkansas, which also is running the first employer pay-to-train fund for apprenticeships.

I’d recommend keeping a close eye on how this one develops. Republicans are very much down with talent marketplaces, with a congressman not too long ago likening them to the development of human flight. The very open question, pun intended because I’m very tired, is whether talent marketplaces, skill wallets, et al. will ever take off with employers. In publicizing this competition, Ed noted that a goal of this work is to improve workforce participation rates. That hasn’t happened in Alabama, a place where companies are very worried about workforce participation rate, but where that rate recently drifted backward, per the most recent data from April.

I won’t go so far as to say that this is the last chance to make talent marketplaces happen, but if it’s not going to happen now, there is a question of when. This is an interesting mix of states to figure out that answer.