It’s a tricky thing to write a policy document saying what your team is going to do to make things better.

Set the bar too high, and there’s a chance you’re apt to get dinged, eventually, for failing to do everything exactly as you said. Set the bar too low, and it looks like you’re not trying at all or just doing the job you were already expected to do.

I have a nuanced perspective on this because I’ve been on both sides of these pieces of paper, which can be rather energizing when they hit stakeholders at the right moment. As an investigative reporter, these were the types of things I’d go back and check to see if a political leader had done any of the stuff they put in black and white—which, as you might guess, is a thing they really hate. In my last job at the Department of Labor, much of my work was actually putting into action one of these big policy documents, the Biden Administration’s principles for improving American employment.

In both senses, the second Trump Administration’s America’s Talent Strategy is an unusual document to me. The blueprint for the Administration’s workforce efforts, which turned one on Wednesday, is at times more thinktank-y than an actionable government policy document, and it certainly seems to have gotten a warmer reaction in some of those circles. But that also makes it a much harder document for the Administration to show it’s done what it’s said beyond the stuff it was expected to do.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been digging through America’s Talent Strategy and checking it against what appears to be happening and what isn’t. What you’ll find below isn’t a point-by-point, pass-fail grade because I’m not sure that’s fair or even possible at this stage.

While there are some clear points of progress, I did come away feeling especially grim about one of the Administration’s key goals, and I found myself nurturing an interesting (and concerning) new theory on how the Administration is handling a big-ticket issue in workforce.