The Trump administration has rolled out a strategy for improving the federal workforce system and developing alternatives to four-year college degrees. Meanwhile, the White House has begun tapping deals with Ivy League universities to pay for some workforce development programs.
The Departments of Labor, Commerce, and Education issued the 27-page “talent strategy” report. Former veteran officials at those agencies, from both sides of the political spectrum, say the report is reasonable and well articulated, describing goals shared by most workforce pros.
However, an actual plan with deliverables and timelines is the needed next step, they say. And the report’s stated goals—from streamlining data systems to modernizing licensing systems—will be very hard to achieve, say those sources, particularly given the DOGE-led gutting of staff members and institutional knowledge at the Labor and Education Departments.
The report’s tri-agency approach is part of the administration’s emphasis on integrated, cross-sectoral systems. But the White House says the Labor Department should be the lead agency for all federal workforce development efforts.
The current patchwork of workforce programs creates a “disjointed and bureaucratic system” for jobseekers, according to the report. “The fragmented web of duplicative programs must be replaced with a streamlined, coordinated system that delivers unified workforce services.”
States will be able to integrate disparate federal workforce funding streams into a single block grant, say the agencies, citing the Make America Skilled Again proposal from President Trump’s May budget request.
The report also says the administration will work with Congress on a legislative proposal, drawing from workforce development authority held by tribal governments, which would allow for the streamlining of state grants and the addition of clear accountability provisions.
While many state workforce leaders might welcome the proposed consolidation and flexibility, the MASA plan also includes a proposed $1.64B budget cut to $4.6B in workforce funding streams.
“As the report highlights, we need to modernize how workers find good jobs and how businesses find skilled workers,” Katie Spiker, chief of federal affairs for the National Skills Coalition, writes on LinkedIn. “Starving an already underfunded system would move us in the wrong direction.”
Credentials of Value
Industry should lead the revamped workforce system, the three agencies say, with a boost for registered apprenticeships and other high-quality work-based learning opportunities that lead to in-demand jobs. In addition, targeted federal investments should back employer-led upskilling in priority industries.
“Employers must play a central role in defining in-demand skills, validating training models, and steering investments toward the roles and credentials that matter most,” the report says.
The strategy includes a focus on performance funding. It seeks to direct money toward education and training providers that generate measurable returns in employment, earnings, and credentials awarded.
On the data front, the three departments will seek to coordinate across a wide range of databases to create a “single, integrated framework for tracking education-to-employment outcomes, reducing duplication, and improving cross-agency data alignment.”
The agencies also will seek to develop a public Credentials of Value scorecard, which sounds similar to a system Texas has been building.
Also this week, the Labor Department debuted a performance dashboard to track the effectiveness of Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act programs. With data from 550 workforce development boards around the country, the public-facing tool includes earnings, employment, and credential attainment rates for WIOA program participants.
Ivy League U.’s and Community Colleges
The administration describes its talent strategy and focus on workforce programs as a corrective to leaning too heavily on the traditional four-year college model.
“For decades, America’s labor market relied on the university system to develop new generations of workers,” the report says. “But this ‘college-for-all’ approach has failed, and the patchwork of non-college programs targeting occupation-specific skills is inadequate to replace it.”
The broad brushstrokes of this new approach arrive as the White House has begun to make good on President Trump’s promise in May to take money away from Harvard University and give it to trade schools. Those moves are part of the administration’s aggressive, wide-ranging pressure campaign against universities.
According to reports from The New York Times and Bloomberg, Harvard has signaled a willingness to contribute $500M to workforce training programs in exchange for the restoration of more than $2B in frozen federal funds.
The administration has a precedent to lean on, having recently secured a voluntary agreement from Brown University to contribute $50M over 10 years to workforce development organizations in Rhode Island.
Brown will choose the locations and distribute the funds, says a university spokeswoman: “The agreement aligns with long-standing initiatives to support local partners who make a difference in the lives of thousands of Rhode Islanders and prove to be powerful engines of economic mobility in the state we call home.”
Trump’s pitting of job training against traditional college could pose risks to workforce programs. The pendulum in Washington tends to swing, and zero-sum thinking won’t cut it if the goal is to help millions of Americans break into better careers.
Another big question for many across higher education and workforce development is the extent to which Trump’s Republican Party thinks community colleges can be part of the solution to the nation’s labor market challenges. So far, the signals haven’t been good for the two-year sector.
For example, as it moves career and technical education programs to the Labor Department and away from the Education Department, the administration wants to limit federal CTE funding to K–12 schools while seeking a $400M cut to annual federal support for those programs at community colleges and area CTE centers.
It wasn’t all bad news for the college degree in the talent strategy—the apprenticeship degree got a shout-out in the report.
The call to expand job-embedded degree programs is further evidence that the model is a priority across geographic boundaries and political parties, says Joe E. Ross, president of Reach University, which offers apprenticeship degree programs and has experienced abrupt cuts by the Trump administration.
The Kicker: “I think this is the first time the executive branch has ever mentioned the concept,” he says. “There is room in this plan for a different kind of degree.”
— Elyse Ashburn contributed reporting for this article.