President Trump issued an executive order in April of 2025 that set a goal of reaching 1M new active apprentices in the registered system. It was one of a slew of such orders in the administration’s first 100 days, and was generally met with enthusiasm among workforce development pros.

Quickly though, there were questions about what precisely the target was, how the administration would back it up amid a push to cut the U.S. Department of Labor’s budget and staff—and, as the months wore on, whether the goal had been softened.

In an interview with Work Shift, Marek Laco, acting assistant secretary of the Labor Department’s Employment and Training Administration, addressed those questions and shared his perspective on progress to date. He acknowledged that the executive order says “new active apprentices,” a combination of the terms for newly enrolled apprentices and those who are actively participating in a program at any point in time.

But Laco says that the department has from the beginning focused on hitting 1M total active apprentices—including both new and continuing ones—by the end of Trump’s term. And despite lingering questions, he says, that goal isn’t changing.

“Even if you look back, I’d say the goal hasn’t evolved,” Laco says. “Our primary focus has been on a million active apprentices.”

That’s an ambitious target, experts say. When the goal was set, the system was sitting at 679K active apprentices after a decade of growth.

Taking Stock: About 16 months later, registered apprenticeships have continued to grow, but at a slower rate than pre-pandemic. The country had just over 700K active apprentices at the end of the last fiscal year, growth that mostly came from a drop in the number of apprentices leaving before the end of their program. The number of new apprentices actually dipped for the first time since the pandemic.

The total number of active apprentices is now up to 714K. New apprentices are down again, as of June, but that could change as data arrives for the final three months of the federal fiscal year. If the growth trend of the past few years continues, the administration would come up about 150K apprentices short, even if the timeline is extended to 2030, according to a recent analysis by Jobs for the Future.

Laco says the Labor Department expects a combination of moves made in the last year to shift that trajectory. That includes regulatory and funding changes designed to:

“The clear directive we got is we have to move faster,” Laco says. “We’ve had successes, but scale is what’s needed.”

Laco says that to reach scale, the department is focused on expanding into less traditional industries and jobs, and then getting repeat buy-in from employers. To do that you have to entice more companies to try out apprenticeships, he says. That’s the idea behind a new $162M pay-for-performance fund, which rerouted many existing apprenticeship dollars into incentive payments for employers, and an earlier cooperative agreement with Arkansas focused on advanced manufacturing nationwide.

“Employers generally like the model,” Laco says. “Once they do it, more often than not, they stick with it; they see value in doing it.”

In addition to Arkansas, the department inked cooperative agreements with five other organizations to manage the pay-for-performance funds and provide incentives for employers across the country to hire apprentices. They’ll be testing out different models to see what incentive structures work best in various industries, including shipbuilding, telecommunications, and automotive tech. 

Laco demurred on whether the department sees this as a pilot that could lead to more substantial, ongoing pay-for-performance funding in the future. The current money is slated to be distributed for four years.

“We are very focused on using existing funding as effectively as possible,” Laco says.

For Jobs for the Future—which will manage $40M of the pay-for-performance funds—that means a particular focus on improving persistence and completion among apprentices. The national completion rate for registered apprenticeship currently sits at 46.5%, and the group’s recent analysis estimates that boosting that by 10 percentage points would add 37K active apprentices per year.

“In our approach, completion, quality, and persistence are key,” says Myriam Sullivan, associate vice president of JFF’s Center for Apprenticeship & Work-Based Learning.

Money and Markets

Deborah Kobes, senior fellow for apprenticeship and workforce at the Urban Institute, agrees that boosting completion is a “clever and thoughtful” way to look at growing the system. 

“One of the big barriers is getting more employers engaged—that up-front hump of getting an employer to the table,” she says. “If you can have strategies like increasing completion rates that keep employers at the table, that’s good.”

Research has also shown that pay-for-performance incentives, specifically, can be effective. But Kobes says that for all the attention paid to the new fund, it isn’t a major departure from the past. Previous awards to intermediaries have included incentive funds for employers tied to outcomes, even if the grants weren’t called pay-for-performance.

“It does increase the amount of those incentive funds, for sure, so there is a shift in emphasis there,” she says. “But it doesn’t change the tools in the toolbox.”

And it doesn’t add new or more predictable money to the system, but repurposes the existing $285M appropriation for apprenticeship. Ultimately, Kobes says, substantial growth will require more investment—a perspective shared by JFF and groups like Apprenticeships for America.

In the short run, however, the labor market may have as much of a say as any single policy decision. When employers are uncertain and pulling back on hiring entry-level workers, they typically aren’t hiring more apprentices, either. 

“Apprenticeship is certainly facing a headwind,” Kobes says.