How we approach publicly funded programs for rural workers is often not built to take into account what those programs need to succeed. There are lessons to be learned from that about how the federal government can better use all the workforce tools it has now.

Well, if nothing else, the federal government spends plenty of money in the direction of rural areas.

For example, on July 10, my weekly grants listings had nine different funding opportunities, totaling nearly $100 million—with what feels like 700 of them going toward building up the rural healthcare workforce.

But “spending in the direction of rural areas” is not “actually helping rural areas.” On that front, federal rural workforce grants aren’t terribly well built to do the job.

Rural workforce education and policy are quite fundamental to me. I grew up in a rural place, and seeing the workforce struggles faced by rural people is why I’m here. I spent several of my years at DOL working on rural initiatives. Rural workers are capable of a lot, and the organizations that serve them well are extraordinary—and good bets for federal dollars.

Both the workers and the organizations are farther away from many resources because they’re in places with lower population density. How agencies design the processes for obtaining these grants doesn’t always take this into account.

For example, many federal workforce competitions require applicants to build complex, multi-level partnerships that might not be possible in their communities. Those requirements often seem cut-and-paste from grantmaking aimed at larger organizations in areas with less distance between resources.

There are other mismatches in design. For one Department of Labor rural grant program I know very well, the Trump Administration recently raised the award range from $150,000 to $1.5 million to $2 million to $8 million. More money being a problem might seem counterintuitive. Yet, rural workforce organizations frequently tell me they don’t have the manpower to handle that kind of cash or the endless federal documentation that comes with it.

The same grant also narrowed when grantees can use federal funds for things like transportation, which is particularly important right now for getting rural workers to and through training. They face longer drives, and they’re getting hit hard by high gas prices due to the Iran War. That further complicates access issues made worse by state and local officials’ skittishness to use strategies that can really help rural workers, but might sound like the “illegal DEIA” the Administration says it’s rooting out.

Other issues seem more head scratching. A good example is this year’s Department of Education rural postsecondary education grant, put together at DOL as part of the Trump Administration’s redistribution of Ed’s responsibilities. Among other things, the grant could fund work to “expand access to career pathways in an AI-driven economy” using DOL’s recommended framework for teaching “AI literacy.”

The “AI-driven economy” is not at all incompatible with rural areas, but there’s still a major barrier that might create some problems with educating rural workers on AI: access to reliable, high-speed internet, which is still lacking in many rural communities. The grant listing’s only mention of internet access is a set of tips for uploading grant applications over a dial-up connection.

People who do this work in rural areas frequently describe federal grant design the way someone might describe watching the wrong ends of Legos get smashed together for several hours. Those problems start at the top, in my experience.

Lawmakers enjoy voting for things that look like they’re doing something for the rural areas in their backyards. They don’t often pay attention to how many of those things they’ve voted for. That has stacked up a lot of federal grants that are slightly different, but not at all the same.

Historically, if those grants don’t actually reach lawmakers’ backyards, lawmakers have been quite vocal with agencies about their displeasure. That tends to pressure agencies to be overly cautious with money for areas they might not fully understand, translating into fairly rote workforce projects that “serve” rural areas but aren’t terribly tailored to their needs.

If you want the best results from a pot of grant money, you need to design the rules of a competition to favor organizations that know what they’re talking about and can do the work. You also need to shape what applicants are required to demonstrate to ensure that the right needs of workers, employers, or whomever else are being met.

Or to use a trendy phrase with policymakers in this space: what gets measured gets managed.

If an agency is not asking about things that affect the rural workforce, those issues are less likely to be addressed when the money hits the ground.

The broader challenge here is that very often federal workforce dollars aren’t shaped with the end users in mind. They don’t often fit the capabilities of organizations that actually exist. By not being more thoughtful, they put up a lot of walls between the money and actually delivering what employees and workers need.

Based on the winds in this space, a lot of people are waiting until the next big fix for come from the Hill to shape workforce dollars for the better. I’m a big supporter of a reset, but that’s leaving a lot of dollars on the table in the meantime. Public workforce money is a tool, and right now we’re using a wrench as a hammer. And also a screwdriver. And also a can of beans that were in the toolbox for some reason.

Rural programs are a good area for federal policymakers to start sorting how to better use those tools in a non-hammer fashion. Yes, the Hill has stacked up many rural workforce programs that overlap with each other in confusing ways. But federal policymakers have a lot of discretion to shape and invest these dollars strategically to get the results they want.

Untying that knot of rural programs can provide clues for how to do this work better across the broader federal grants portfolio. The streamlining needed to better serve rural areas doesn’t just have to serve rural areas. If a grant-mandated, multi-tentacled uber-partnership isn’t the best tool for workforce projects in a rural area, it might not be the best in a big city either.

That doesn’t mean treating rural communities like guinea pigs for bigger problems; it means treating them as priorities, the first people to benefit as a consequence of where they live. That’s really not something rural workers are used to, but it is something they certainly could benefit greatly from.

The Hill already sends a lot of money in the direction of rural workers. Figuring out how to make those dollars actually help rural areas could tell us a lot about how to use all federal dollars while we wait on the big fix.