Will the Trump Administration spend the money Congress just gave it?
Plus, a bellwether on Trump workforce policy, that whole union-friendly Trump Administration hasn't arrived yet, and this week's grants listings.
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A lot of deadlines coming up; not a lot of new money following them yet. There isn’t a lot of new workforce money going up on grants.gov. Still around $2 billion this week, but the big question is what comes next.
Will the Trump Administration not spend the money Congress just appropriated? In theory, an administration would want Congress to do the political dirty work here: cut the programs you don’t want anymore so you don’t have to be the bad guy who didn’t issue a funding opportunity. But (1) the Trump Administration is not worried about being the bad guy and (2) we’re inching into a question of timing.
Even though the end of the fiscal year is six months away, some grants need healthy application periods of 60 or 90 days because of complexity or the types of stakeholders involved. There also can be other bases to touch, like pre-award Hill notifications and a bunch of other lovely benchmarks asked for by appropriators.
“Doing stuff in a timeframe that is not unreasonable” was not an Original Recipe Trump priority. “Do that thing the Hill asked for” wasn’t always either. But now they have fewer grant staff to make things work, a bunch of pissed-off grantees, and members on the Hill who might get more ornery if money they just approved doesn’t go out the door—or if they don’t get that very important call.
Some federal money expires on June 30, or 102 days from now. That timeframe is probably way too short to do a grant competition that isn’t the equivalent of “Send us a Play-Doh fish in a box within 30 days. We’ll give you money for it if it’s in less than 10 pieces!” Of the grants I’m tracking, I don’t see any significant June 30 dollars that have not started competition.
The possibly doomed Workforce Pathways for Youth must be awarded by that date, though. We’ll see if it’s possible someone can make a call on a batch of applications submitted on December 3, or 108 days ago…
The long process of the Education Department swallowing itself continues. The Trump “dismantling” order hit the street yesterday. It sounds like there will be education dollars left to spend after the “dismantling.” So does that money get transferred over to other agencies (via a memorandum of understanding) to run the competitions, which is not an uncommon practice? If so, what about that “We have fewer grants staff” part?
President Trump appointed Deputy Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling as acting head of the probably doomed Institute of Museum and Library Sciences. I got many texts yesterday asking if I know what this means, and I haven’t heard anything other than fact-light speculation. I will note that Sonderling is the most experienced hand among DOL’s top political decisionmakers, much more so than Labor Secretary Lori-Chavez DeRemer. In theory, it’s a different DOL if he has split attention, but I don’t know specifics on post-confirmation portfolios.
If you missed it yesterday, I did a piece breaking down DOGE’s first cuts at DOL and how they conflict with Trump/Republican messaging on child labor. I don’t usually like to send things this late in the day, but I wanted to let the situation bake as late in the week as I could in case DOGE finally posted those grants on their kill list. It remains interesting that they haven’t yet.
Heads up. State Apprenticeship Expansion grant deadline is next Thursday. Illinois apprenticeship grant deadline is today.
Behind the paywall
A grant to watch for understanding Trump II workforce and jobs policies.
Trump II killed another big apprenticeship thing that unions liked, but I think there’s still something neat you can try with the new DOL apprenticeship grant.
All the workforce grant money I can find and Substack will let me print.