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

Allow me to summarize the last week of workforce policymaking developments with a story about UAB football’s defensive coordinator.

Todd Grantham is one of those football coaches who, when your team hires him, you might think, “Wow that guy has a great resume.” He’s worked for the Dallas Cowboys, Georgia, Louisville, Mississippi State, Florida, Oklahoma State, and a few other spots. Then you realize he was largely fired from all those jobs or left because his boss was fired—the latter being a development typically not unrelated to the hiring of Todd Grantham.

Spencer Hall, the best college football writer alive in my opinion, calls Grantham’s pyrrhic specialty as “emotional blitzing.” On his podcast, Hall has recalled being in the press box for a massive nationally televised game between Houston and Louisville, where Grantham was defensive coordinator at the time. When Grantham gets mad, he will send the same blitz over and over again—to the point Hall has said that one of the Louisville beat writers was able to call the plays in advance on one sequence.

Unfortunately, the other team’s offense was able to do that too. Louisville lost that game to Houston.

I share this mainly because “emotional blitzing” is what I thought of immediately when I read the White House Big and Angry Proposed Budget last week. The budget calls for gutting or eliminating most of the programs by which the Trump Administration is presently using to carry out its increasingly hard-to-reach workforce goals. For the second straight year, the White House pushes for those programs to be replaced with a state-by-state “Make America Skilled Again” block grant, an idea that didn’t get any traction among allies on the Hill and appeared to be replaced by a different block grant plan in a later Trump workforce blueprint.

Along the way, the budget attacks or calls for the end of several “woke” programs the Administration is using right now to try to carry out key priorities, like Workforce Pell. Its workforce section re-ups an attack on the beloved Easterseals charity that mortified some Republicans last year and also attacks LiUNA, the laborers’ union, an organization that could be rather helpful to its efforts to build up apprenticeships in key infrastructure fields, if the Administration were so inclined.

Speaking of Congress, its “emotional blitzing” manifested on Monday, with House Republicans releasing a partisan re-up of the last serious effort to reauthorize most of those programs the White House wants dead. Typical efforts to reauthorize the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act—America’s most consistent source of workforce funding—have been bipartisan affairs. This one is not.

Some Hill observers read this bill as House Republicans making one last effort before foreboding-looking midterms to look like they’ve done something on workforce. If true, the question is whether they’re trying to convince voters or the Trump Administration that they’re doing stuff. I’ve also heard that a main motivation behind the bill is to advance legislation codifying the Administration’s efforts to move the Department of Education’s share of WIOA across the Mall to the Department of Labor. Based on the past 15 months of workforce conversations on the Hill, I have doubts this bill has support to clear the Republican-controlled House. It certainly can’t clear the Senate.

It’s also hard to say this is on the same page with Trump II. The Trump budget proposal’s “Make America Skilled Again” grant doesn’t really resemble the “Make America Skilled Again” state pilot program crafted in House Republicans’ bill, which is another flavor of Republican focus on remodeling the state and local bureaucracy administering federal workforce programs.

Comments made by DOL’s workforce leadership two weeks ago suggest the Administration—or at least the people who have to do the work on workforce—expects neither effort to succeed. In all likelihood, this makes those Trump II officials’ jobs harder, especially the pointless venom in the budget proposal.

Trump II’s agency leaders are largely focused on inviting states to waive portions of WIOA they don’t like. Hill Democrats are portraying that effort as a “Trojan horse” to take more damaging actions against states’ workforce funding, a supposition I gather some states already had made without any contact with the Hill. The White House’s proposed blowup of WIOA would make these waivers redundant. Proposing a change incongruent with the Administration’s actual plans—and having House Republicans hype a bill that would create another waiver process—probably won’t help convince states that requesting WIOA waivers is worth the time, work, and risk.

I have more below on the complex way this cuts into the Administration’s apprenticeship growth efforts, but the best thing I can say is that it muddles and cuts by nearly two-thirds the funding that DOL has used for its signature effort on workforce during Trump II: pay-to-train incentive funds for employers, for which it has awarded or announced $180 million in funding in the past year. The deadline to apply to run several of these funds was on Friday, the same day the White House announced its budget proposal.

If you’re a Republican (or folks around workforce deeply worried about offending this Administration), I’m not writing this to be mean or throw down a partisan dunk on Trump II. If you read Tuesday’s newsletter, you probably picked up that we’re in a rather key moment for the American workforce due to AI-blamed layoffs. We probably can’t wait for another group of political leaders to make the inroads we need to make.

Some Republicans (and a whole lot of Democrats) have told me they think current Republican elected leaders do more to undermine efforts to respond to this moment than they do to help them. I have heard from people across the political spectrum that Republican congressional leadership on workforce seems to struggle to do more than one thing at once—not exactly ideal for the complex problems facing workers and employers.

A diminishing number of people I engage with think our current workforce laws are built to handle the coming changes to the American workforce. The Administration had more people on board with its waiver plan a few weeks ago until it made pitches to workforce leaders that seemed to blame those same leaders for problems created by lawmakers, particularly Republicans allied with the Administration.

The tone and content of the budget proposal, then, couldn’t have come at a worse moment. Trump White House budget officials—who still seem to have some mystique with the D.C. political press—have seemed quite underinformed to people who know the gears of government and seem especially out of their element talking about federal workforce programs. Unfortunately, they seem quite aligned with the president, who you might have noticed isn’t taking it well that his Administration is unpopular with voters because they see its actions as having made the economy worse.

That doesn't get fixed by calling out Easterseals and threatening to kill off "woke" programs that the Administration is presently trying to harness to carry out its own agenda.

But at least it made them feel better. I guess.

Arnold Ventures will fund a new project by Apprenticeships for America and the American Institutes for Research that will build on “growing momentum” for state funds paying employers for hiring and retaining apprentices, according to an announcement expected to publish today.

The project will “support peer-to-peer learning, develop pay-for-performance legislation, and share lessons with policymakers and practitioners nationwide” in a group of states that will include Maryland and Iowa. AFA will handle the policy- and capacity-building work, and AIR will handle the research side of the project.

The effort is expected to produce guidance and model legislation for states on these funds.

“The project aims to help states shift away from fragmented, one-off pilot programs toward sustainable public funding mechanisms that reward outcomes for apprentices and employers,” says a release announcing the project.

This is definitely a big moment for these incentives, which I call “pay to train” for accessibility, but typically are called “pay per performance” or “pay per success.” As I note above, the Trump Administration has put $180 million toward apprenticeship incentives and $266 million toward pay-to-train incentives overall. If federal funding isn’t significantly cut, I expect more incentive funds in the future.