The Trump Administration is laser-focused on hitting one million apprentices. A lot of people don’t think it’s going well. There are three questions I have about what’s next.

Next week is National Apprenticeship Week, that special time of year when all the kids set out their career ladders and St. Competency leaves them an industry-recognized credential provided they’ve completed 2,000 hours of on-the-job training in an apprenticeable occupation Apprenticeship World celebrates Registered Apprenticeship’s successes and tries to move forward the art of training people on the job to master the job. In some ways, though, this year could be a touch fraught.

For the more lightly initiated, apprenticeship is a very structured, step-by-step program where someone is paid to do a job while learning it. Registered Apprenticeship is a voluntary consumer-protection program that is the main way that the United States regulates apprenticeship by recognizing better programs. It’s ultimately controlled by the Department of Labor, but DOL has deputized about half the states to register and oversee programs to make sure they’re still in compliance with the rules, meant to ensure the quality of jobs and safety of training.

The big news, of course, is that the Trump Administration just fired its labor secretary. While she reportedly wasn’t terribly involved in the policy decisions driving it, Lori Chavez-DeRemer had at least fashioned herself as the primary public saleswoman for its push to get to one million active registered apprentices, a hard-to-reach number that, as of today, public-facing DOL numbers indicate it is approximately 300,000 apprentices short of.

This year’s National Apprenticeship Week theme name—”America at Work: Making America Skilled Again”—references both Chavez-DeRemer’s cross-country tour bound up in the scandals that led to her departure and the White House Make America Skilled Again block grants that even a quite deferential Republican Congress hasn’t meaningfully entertained. Until a few minutes ago, Chavez-DeRemer’s picture remained on the National Apprenticeship Week website.

As you might imagine when the boss quits amid scandal, things aren’t regarded as going great. I really haven’t heard from anyone other than Administration officials who thinks the climb to one million is going well. The most positive talk I have seen or heard about the effort came from Chavez-DeRemer, who is gone.

The complaints I have heard from Apprenticeship World in recent weeks have been that the Department’s plans seem more and more unfocused. It’s a vast difference from where we were at the top of the year, when there was a gush of enthusiasm for Trump Administration pay-to-train incentives funds following the announcement of a $145 million investment. (More on some of those incentives tomorrow.)

Many folks I’ve spoken with say Trump II’s big investments in pay-to-train projects turned out too complicated and offer too little money to get big or small employers on board.¹ There’s also been an intimation that one million apprentices is too much of the focus. I have heard persistent worries about how far the definition of apprenticeship will get stretched to meet what several apprenticeship advocates see as an arbitrary number.

To those concerns, I think White House’s less-public expectations for apprenticeship are quite aggressive, based on what I’m hearing. I think agency leaders do a pretty good job selling their workforce priorities when they’re given the space to do so by the White House. Some of those priorities are pretty aligned with the ideas I write about in this space and what I hear is needed from both sides of the aisle. But the White House is, you know, the White House. They aren’t quite so attuned, they like to gripe and fight even when it costs them broader support, and they’ll win the big arguments within the Administration because they are, again, the White House.

Or, to put this all more succinctly: everything is weird right now.

For what it’s worth, I remain a big apprenticeship believer because it solves both employers and workers’ big workforce needs at once. Employers get someone doing the job right away, and workers get paid to learn. And while there is plenty of room to be downbeat, one million apprentices isn’t the worst goal. I just think it pays to be realistic about what’s needed and what’s next.

So today, ahead of a lot of events and conversations next week about apprenticeship, I’m going to cover three big questions I’m not hearing asked enough about Trump II’s Registered Apprenticeship strategy. I have some ideas about where I would go next if I were trying to get to one million apprentices in the current environment, some of which I can comfortably say don’t seem Trump-compatible. Which is part of the problem.

A quick flag: I won’t get into the biggest debate here I expect to blow up soon, which is DOL’s relationship with states deputized to register programs. I think that belongs in a different space updating what I wrote last month about some significant new DOL guidance.

To state the obvious, business interests favor Republicans because they expect them to keep taxes low and leave them alone. But apprenticeship is an area where, between the lines, I’ve picked up that current Republican policy approaches may be making it harder for businesses to get into apprenticeship.

Why? Well, the Trump default is to defer to business on all things, and a frustration I have picked up from business-minded folks is that “deference” can feel a lot like “expecting us to do their job for them while doing ours, too.” And brother, I feel that.

Speaking as a small-business owner, I can tell you that every day is figuring out a new set of answers to problems that rapidly evolve and change. There remains only so many hours in the day, despite some business influencers’ creative claims to the contrary. If ask me to volunteer to do something new in my operation that seems to benefit your goals more than mine—that you say on the front end will take a lot of work, and the payoff of which may be years down the road—then tell me you’re deferring to me to figure out the fine details to avoid “government dictating the solutions to employers” or something like that… um, I’m probably sending your email to spam.

That’s what it feels like is happening with Registered Apprenticeship right now. That context is something I’ve heard of eluding conservative policymakers, who, when asked why they’re not giving more definition to a workforce plan, might say that “businesses already know the answer to that and government shouldn’t be telling businesses how to do their job.” But there’s a difference between “telling businesses how to do their job” and “helping them understand why the hell they should try apprenticeship and how the hell they can do it without blowing up their already busy days,” which is where the gap is now.

The typical business pitch for apprenticeship is that you’ll eventually save money on recruiting and retaining talent. It’s a good pitch for someone like me who thinks through workforce issues on a broader timeline. It’s not as good of a pitch for employers who need talent now, and it’s hard to sell someone on money they don’t know they’re saving, particularly if there’s a lot of building and spending involved to get there.

Where Trump II could be helpful is building a broader set of business cases for Registered Apprenticeship. Because business interests trend Republican, this pitch might get more attention in the right places because this is a Trump Administration.

If I had to suggest a direction, it’s this: a lot of businesses are on the sidelines waiting to see if AI changes how they hire. Apprenticeship lets employers build up workers in ways that can accommodate many different scenarios that could face their business in the coming years, so that employers don’t have to scramble to find new staff every time things shift due to technology.

I also would focus on making registration as simple as possible. One of the highest-pitched concerns I have heard about the pay-to-train incentives, which tend to favor larger employers, is that multistate employers have to go to multiple states with different registration approaches to get programs registered and become eligible for the money.

DOL retains the ability to directly register programs, even in states where it has deputized the state government to register programs for DOL. Given DOL’s close involvement in the pay-to-train incentives, it makes sense that it would offer direct (and within reason, streamlined) registration to eligible employers seeking the dollars.

I gather a big reason why this hasn’t happened is federal staffing, and another reason is Trump officials’ not wanting to be seen has having the federal government usurp states’ authority. State apprenticeship leaders also will hate that I’m suggesting this idea. It opens up an alternative to their processes for signing up—some of which they feel very, very passionate about defending. If any administration is going to look for a way to try to slice at some deputized states’ careful approach to Registered Apprenticeship, it’s definitely this one.

Still, it’s an idea worth considering. This idea also delays an accelerating confrontation point between the Administration and deputized states over whether states are moving fast enough to sign up employers seeking the incentives. It also takes pressure and workload off deputized states if the incentives do eventually inspire a crush of employers to sign up.

The Trump Administration has signaled to state workforce officials that it’s expecting them to use their annual allotments of federal workforce dollars to support Registered Apprenticeship. The problem is that those allotments are meted out by the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, which favors cheaper, shorter approaches to training workers. And that means it’s really a conversation for a Republican-controlled Congress, as state and local workforce officials will tell you.

Registered Apprenticeship isn’t short, and it’s not cheap enough for WIOA, given the amount of money states end up spending on an expensive performance reporting system that doesn’t produce terribly useful metrics on program success. Republicans still strongly favor those failed metrics, based on what I heard in a House Education and Workforce Committee hearing on Tuesday during lawmakers’ markup on a GOP-led redo of WIOA.

Here’s the thing, though: many national Republicans weren’t fans of Registered Apprenticeship until… January 2025, when Trump II took power. This is largely due to Registered Apprenticeship’s strong ties to unions, who have done the investment and work on their programs that many employer interests haven’t.

Many Republicans aren’t big fans of unions, even if the Teamsters president is showing up at the White House to see Trump. I remain puzzled by this having been there in Trump I, but there are Republicans who still hold a flame for Industry-Recognized Apprenticeship Programs, the first administration’s efforts to “privatize” voluntary and privately run Registered Apprenticeship. Several of the industry approvers for the IRAPs effort—meant to free apprenticeship from the shackles of government control—were states, including the same agencies that register apprenticeships on behalf of DOL.

And yet, the fire still burns—including at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative thinktank that provided a lot of planning and staffing for this Trump White House. Its Project 2025 blueprint for the Administration (authored by current Solicitor of Labor Jonathan Berry) called for restoring IRAPs. In February 2025, Heritage’s National Right to Work Committee published a piece that complains about Trump I “clearly acting at the behest of building-trades union bosses” by not including construction apprenticeships in the IRAPs effort. Unions stoutly opposed IRAPs based on worries it could be an endaround more protective Registered Apprenticeship rules largely built for the trades.

In 2022, when Democrats proposed strengthening WIOA’s ties to Registered Apprenticeship, Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., complained about their trying to fund a “Great Depression-era” program she said hadn’t produced results, citing pandemic-era stats under Trump I’s watch.

Foxx, an IRAPs backer, was ranking member at the time on the House Education and Workforce Committee, and she has been key to steering federal workforce funding’s direction over the last decade. During Tuesday’s markup, she noted that portions of her own efforts to update WIOA showed up in the new bill proposed by Republicans this session.

“Democrats still want to double down on this system rather than allowing for other effective work-based learning models,” she said in 2022.

Please note that I’m not trying to be conspiratorial here. Rather, I just think it’s worth acknowledging that all that opposition to Registered Apprenticeship didn’t just wash out overnight from the Republican Party.

There are some really smart former state workforce leaders staffing parts of the Trump Administration. It’s curious to me that they would start with state and local officials, not allies on the Hill who have been extremely accommodating to Trump II, in trying to wring more out of WIOA for Trump II’s Registered Apprenticeship goals.

I acknowledge that either party may be loath to open up changes to WIOA unless they’re taking a big swing to fix it. That said, I also think that a surgical statutory change in one of the WIOA formula programs to prioritize support for Registered Apprenticeship would do a lot more than telling states they’re expected to do more for Registered Apprenticeship without giving them the tools to do so. That smaller shift would be less discordant with the Administration’s workforce goals than parts of the currently proposed, 500-page WIOA redo, which largely commits Trump II to the current system something its workforce blueprints indicate it doesn’t like.

Unlike that bill, I think it would have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, where there are more universally warm feelings about Registered Apprenticeship these days. I think it’s an open question if it would have enough support in the Republican-controlled House, given the small margins in the majority and the large continued dislike of unions within the GOP.

I have heard a lot of speculation that a 2027 Democratic majority (or majorities) might try to revive a modernizing redo of the National Apprenticeship Act, the statutory basis for Registered Apprenticeship. I also have heard speculation that it might even clear a split Congress and get signed by a Trump White House. I disagree, but it is a thought that’s out there.

But here’s an idea I have had a lot of conversation about lately: why wouldn’t you try to do apprenticeship and WIOA reauthorization at the same time?

One reason apprenticeship and WIOA don’t fit well together is they very clearly were designed in different ecosystems. If you combined them into one ecosystem, that could do a lot for both.

You probably find it absurd that the second Trump Administration—which is very much against anything it perceives to be “illegal DEIA”—would do anything to help women get into apprenticeship. Among other things, it has tried to kill off a DOL grant to get more women into apprenticeship.

But if Trump II is serious about reaching one million apprentices, it might ought to be coming up with a plan. Women make up more than half of the U.S. population, and half of the non-farm payroll workforce in the United States—but 13 percent of the active registered apprentices in statistics published by DOL. New registration of female apprentices also fell last year for the first time since the start of the pandemic, which correlates with the first drop in new apprenticeship enrollment in that timeframe, too.

As I wrote last summer, something in the walls of Registered Apprenticeship makes it not a great opportunity for women. Last year, I heard fears from male-heavy industries that Trump II’s rollback of DOL apprenticeship antidiscrimination rules might harm their ability to recruit new talent.

Trump II hasn’t been huge on women-focused training programs. Yet, I don’t think you can make a credible effort to get to one million apprentices without accounting for the fact that half of all workers just aren’t catching on in Registered Apprenticeship.

Even if Trump II officials can’t sneak through a women-focused apprenticeship effort, I do think that they can help this issue by taking a more sophisticated approach to supportive services, or financial and other help from training funds for things like childcare and transportation. Women (due to childcare especially) can struggle to make it in apprenticeship programs without this kind of help.

The Trump II DOL is doing better on this front, but it isn’t doing as well as it could be. Last week’s new state apprenticeship funding opportunity allows the use of 15 percent of state awards toward Registered Apprenticeship—but only if the state shows that help isn’t available through other sources, like WIOA funds. As I spent months documenting last year, WIOA dollars aren’t a good and consistent source of this help, and WIOA’s look-elsewhere-first scavenger hunt for supportive services tends to lose workers to the type of bureaucratic inefficiency that otherwise would be opposed by this administration.

If you’re going for a volume play on Registered Apprenticeship, you’ve got to pull down barriers for workers, especially women. And you can’t do that if you’re still keeping up one of apprenticeship’s tallest walls.

Sorry for the delayed edition. It’s a busy week in D.C. (No reason.) Tomorrow’s edition will probably be coming to you a little later as well.

Speaking of tomorrow’s newsletter, I’ll clean up some details on the Labor Secretary departure and markup of that Republican redo of WIOA that doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere. I’ll also have some thoughts on what I’m hearing about the pay-to-train incentive funds.