As part of his promise to restore American manufacturing and the fortunes of the working class, President Donald Trump pledged to expand trade apprenticeships. In an April executive order, Trump directed the Department of Labor to deliver within 120 days a plan “to reach and surpass 1 million new active apprentices.”  

That deadline has passed, with no evidence of progress or even a plan to reach the one-million apprenticeship milestone.   

Instead, drastic layoffs, funding cuts, and a purge of “DEI”-related initiatives have sabotaged the emerging apprenticeship movement. Growth in apprenticeships is at its slowest in years, far more sluggish than during Joe Biden’s administration or even the president’s first term. At its current pace, former DOL senior staffer Nick Beadle told me, “I don’t see them getting to 1 million apprentices till 2032.”  

During Biden’s tenure, the government invested nearly $730 million to expand registered apprenticeships. But it was from 2016 to 2020, the last year of Obama’s administration and of Trump’s first term, that apprenticeships posted double-digit percentage increases each year, according to government data. By the end of Biden’s term, in fiscal 2024, there were more than 670,000 active apprentices—or nearly double the roughly 359,000 apprentices in fiscal 2015.  

But this year, the number of new apprentices has grown by only about 3 percent so far, according to Zach Boren, Senior Vice President of Apprenticeships for America and the former chief of registered apprenticeship and policy for the Department of Labor. “We’ve got a White House that has really good talking points on apprenticeship, but no road map,” Boren said.  

One major problem: the gutting of the DOL’s Office of Apprenticeships, first by Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative, and then by the exodus of key staff. There’s literally no one available to write a plan, let alone implement it.  

The office lost its national director and several division chiefs, and staffing levels are down by as much as 30 percent, Boren estimates. The website for the national office lists just three people, all of them designated as “acting.” “The Department of Labor, and especially the Office of Apprenticeship, are running on fumes,” said Boren. 

The Trump administration has also paused or canceled grants for apprenticeship programs and apprenticeship research, which means fewer resources for recruiting and preparing apprenticeship candidates, helping employers and community colleges launch apprenticeship programs, or evaluating their effectiveness.  

Beadle, an investigative journalist before his stint at the agency, told me that at least $30 million in funding appropriated by Congress last year was never spent and has expired. “I have not seen records that confirm they spent all of the $285 billion [allocated] last year on registered apprenticeship,” said Beadle, who writes about workforce development for the Substack “Jobs That Work.”  

In addition, millions of dollars in previously awarded contracts to nonprofits, researchers, and industry intermediaries have been canceled. Among the recipients whose grant was nixed is Reach University, a nonprofit institution that’s pioneering debt-free “apprenticeship degrees.” According to journalist Paul Fain, writing for Work Shift, DOL rescinded $14.7 million in grants to Reach University’s teachers college, including a nearly $10 million grant to one of the institution’s community partners in Louisiana, and another grant to a partner in Arkansas. Through a spokeswoman, Reach University President Joe E. Ross confirmed that as of this writing, the grants had not been reinstated. (Ross also said that “although the grant terminations caused a temporary financial impact, we were able to ensure there was no disruption to any current learner’s degree experience.”) 

Other organizations that didn’t receive anticipated funding include the Interstate Renewal Energy Council, which helps facilitate clean energy industry apprenticeships, and the Healthcare Career Advancement Program (H-CAP), which develops apprenticeships in health care, said Apprenticeships for America’s Boren. The administration has also ended research grants related to apprenticeships, according to Work Shift’s Fain, including a project to provide technical assistance to states expanding apprenticeships and evaluations of youth apprenticeship programs. The Office of Apprenticeship’s grants pages currently indicate “no funding opportunities” and “no active awards.” 

Given the vital role intermediaries play in creating apprenticeship opportunities, the lack of funding for these groups has effectively severed the pipeline. Boren reports “massive layoffs across the apprenticeship field,” with some organizations even shutting their doors. Boren also regrets the lost momentum among businesses. “We’ve had industry groups that have really gotten excited about apprenticeships, and there’ve been some big investments over the last 10 years,” he said. “Now my question is, how many folks like that are no longer interested?” 

Trump’s campaign against “DEI,” however, may prove the most destructive to his stated goal of expanding apprenticeship. While women and minorities are among those most likely to benefit from apprenticeships and to be interested in pursuing them, the Trump administration is committed to shutting them out. As a result, “one million apprentices” will be unattainable if half the workforce is discouraged from participation.  

Trump’s executive order “Ending Radical and Wasteful DEI Programs,” signed on his first day in office, has led to the wholesale purge of websites, data, and programs perceived to promote diversity. The Office of Apprenticeship saw the removal of guidance on affirmative action (“access denied,” the site now reads), regulations on equal opportunity hiring (“page under construction,” as shown by an error message), and even the 2024 report on National Apprenticeship Week, which reportedly included descriptions of recruitment efforts for women and minorities (“page not found”).  

The administration also canceled dozens of grants under the Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations (WANTO) program established in 1992 by President George H.W. Bush, according to a letter sent to DOL by Democratic Reps. Bobby Scott and Rosa DeLauro in May. DOL has since reposted the grants, but the organizations whose awards were terminated are ineligible for this money, reports Mother Jones, and the program no longer prioritizes historically underrepresented groups such as women of color or women with disabilities.  

These actions could undo the progress made over the last decade toward making apprenticeships more accessible. While women have historically made up a fraction of apprentices, their ranks had been growing. Between 2014 and 2023, the share of women apprentices rose five percentage points, from 9.2 percent to 14.4 percent, according to a 2024 report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, and the number of female apprentices tripled. Today, women in apprenticeships currently number fewer than 100,000, according to DOL’s latest data, and the number of Black Americans in apprenticeships is lower still—at under 90,000.   

Much as he did on his show, Trump seems to favor a particular kind of apprentice. A recent social media campaign by the Department of Labor featured what’s presumably Trump’s ideal: a blond, broad-shouldered, AI-generated Aryan avatar ripped straight from the manosphere, with a chiseled jaw and a cleft chin. Historians told the Washington Post that the style of these posts evoked “historical government propaganda, including posters from New Deal-era America and fascist Europe.”  

Ultimately, “propaganda” might be all that Trump’s apprenticeship initiatives turn out to be. Like so many of his promises to his working-class base, “one million apprenticeships” will likely prove hollow.  

The post Trump’s Broken Promise of “One Million Apprentices”  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

During the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump demeaned institutions of higher education as boondoggle bastions of Marxism and scary “DEI” policies, while touting the value of vocational education to help people get good-paying jobs. Now back in the Oval Office, he has the opportunity to turn his impulses on education into policies. But we’ve seen far more focus on who he wants to punish than who he claims he wants to help. 

Harvard and Columbia have faced the most vicious attacks, including attempts to rescind federal funding, influence faculty hires, and ban admission of international students. Trump recently threatened to revoke Columbia’s accreditation. Beyond those targeted salvos, the pending tax cut and spending reform measure known as the One Big Beautiful Bill includes a stiff tax increase on university endowments, especially for institutions with large endowments.  

Trump’s efforts to help bolster and broaden the working class through vocational education have received less attention, which is understandable because the efforts are meager at best. The need to train workers with the skills necessary to find good-paying jobs is always essential, but the need is even more acute today with artificial intelligence and automation rapidly upending the nature of work. 

President Donald Trump issued an executive order in April titled “Preparing Americans for High-Paying Skilled Trade Jobs of the Future,” signaling a reorientation of education policy. 

The executive order didn’t do much on its own. It directed certain cabinet secretaries to produce by late July a set of “strategies to help the American worker” and “identify alternative credentials and assessments to the 4-year college degree that can be mapped to the specific skill needs of prospective employers.” By late August, the secretaries must detail a “plan to reach and surpass 1 million new active apprentices.” 

Those plans haven’t been released yet, but the Trump administration and congressional Republicans don’t have to wait. They could start investing in more vocational education in the One Big Beautiful Bill. And Trump could show his support for additional investment in his Fiscal Year 2026 budget, which is supposed to inform Congress’s work on the annual spending bills that keep the federal government functioning. 

So why are we seeing far more vocational education cuts than investments? 

A major vocational education component of Trump’s budget is consolidating 11 workforce training programs into a singular Make America Skilled Again [MASA] grant program. However, Paul Fain of The Job newsletter reported that the net result is a $1.64 billion cut, a reduction in workforce training spending of about one-third. “The strong consensus we heard from workforce experts,” Fain wrote, “was that the administration’s proposed budget gashing would overshadow efficiencies or other gains that could be realized even with a very well-executed creation of a MASA system. Most say the big plans sound disingenuous alongside an attempt to cut available federal dollars in half.” 

Trump’s executive order emphasizes support for apprenticeships—on-the-job training programs in the skilled trades that often lead to high-paying jobs—and his budget proposal sets aside 10 percent of his MASA grants for apprenticeships. But the National Skills Coalition, a network of corporations and philanthropic organizations that support “inclusive, high-quality skills training,” is unimpressed: “Even with the 10 percent requirement set aside for apprenticeship, roughly $296.6 million of the proposed MASA budget, that’s only an $11 million increase from current levels while $1.6 billion is cut from other workforce programs. The result: a modest bump in apprenticeship funding, but a much larger drop in overall training access.” Fain further notes, “Even the 10 percent requirement could be below current apprenticeship funding levels.” 

The One Big Beautiful Bill has nothing big for vocational education either, as what is in the bill is less than meets the eye. The House-passed version reforms the Pell Grant program to include a Workforce Pell grant, which can be used for short-term job training programs that can be completed in 150 to 600 hours. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the provision would cost about $300 million over a 10-year period, with 100,000 people receiving $2,200 grants by 2034.  

The basic idea of expanding the Pell Grant program to include short-term job training has broad bipartisan support. But the House bill puts a pittance of funds towards Workforce Pell while taking a sledgehammer to traditional Pell, more than doubling the number of credits students need to qualify for full-time enrollment. CBO projects this will leave more than half of Pell recipients with smaller grants, taking $7 billion out of the program. The Center for American Progress further concludes, “This means that in the 2024-25 academic year, only about 2.5 million of the 6.9 million Pell Grant recipients nationwide would have qualified as full time under the new definition. The other two-thirds, about 4.4 million students, would have their award amount prorated based on the number of credits they were enrolled in, or they would lose their Pell Grants completely….”  

Furthermore, some traditional Pell Grant recipients are already enrolled in short-term vocational programs. The CBO analysis notes that “using information from community colleges and research on postsecondary education, CBO expects that many of the students already receive Pell grants because they are enrolled in short-term programs that are ‘stacked’ within longer-term programs that are eligible for Pell grant funding. As a result, under current law, those students can receive Pell grants even if they do not complete the longer-term program.” Vocational education gains with the creation of Workforce Pell may be negated by losses in traditional Pell. 

Moreover, the House bill establishes weak standards for what job training programs qualify for the Workforce Pell program, which will likely lead to participation by ineffective and shady operators. Back in 2021, the Washington Monthly’s Anne Kim counseled that a strong Workforce Pell program could use the approach found in bipartisan legislation written by Democratic Senator Tim Kaine and then-Republican Senator Rob Portman, whose “bill explicitly excludes for-profits from receiving short-term Pell and limits program eligibility to sectors where workers are in demand.” 

Stephanie Cellini, a George Washington University professor and expert on job programs, “has little faith that workforce Pell’s regulations will do much to discourage unscrupulous providers from benefiting,” according to Inside Higher Ed. “The completion and job-placement thresholds, she said, are ‘easily gameable’ since they’re self-reported.” Michelle Dimino, the Director of Education at the Third Way think tank, concludes, “ignoring for-profit colleges’ historical track record of abuse and aggressive recruiting when granted access to new federal aid puts student and taxpayer investment in jeopardy.” 

The yet-to-pass Senate version of the One Big Beautiful Bill does not include the House’s cuts to traditional Pell Grants but does include the weak Workforce Pell standards. 

The bill will also gut the clean energy tax credit program established in the Biden administration with the Inflation Reduction Act. What does that have to do with vocational education? Because the Inflation Reduction Act included bonus credits for apprenticeships in clean energy projects.  

Separate from the legislative process, the Trump administration also aims to undermine Biden’s semiconductor manufacturing bill, known as the CHIPS Act. Axios reported earlier this month, “the Trump administration is renegotiating some CHIPS Act awards, and some previously approved deals likely won’t survive.” CHIPS also included $200 million for job training and workforce development, so any rollback in CHIPS will also negatively impact vocational education. 

Also, without legislation, the Trump administration is trying to shut down the Job Corps program, which provides job training, housing, food, and health care to about 25,000 poor young people at 99 job centers. A Department of Labor order from last month shutting down the centers was stayed by court order, and Job Corps participants have filed a class action lawsuit. Trump’s Fiscal Year 2026 budget also zeroes out the program.  

Job Corps is widely considered to be a flawed program. Kim, for the Monthly, wrote in 2021, “Government audits have been harsh, documenting mismanagement, safety problems, and persistent failures to place trainees into meaningful jobs … Rather than the young people it purports to serve, the program’s biggest beneficiaries may be a tight-knit coterie of for-profit government contractors who administer the program, some of whom have held on to multimillion-dollar contracts for decades.”  

Kim argued that the Job Corps should be reformed and augmented with more promising initiatives like apprenticeship programs. But Trump’s Labor Department officials are doing nothing of the sort. They’re just trying to shut it down without repurposing the money for other vocational education.  

The totality of what the Trump administration and the Republican Congress are doing with vocational education is not a thoughtful approach to lift the poor and raise living standards for the working class. “The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing here,” said apprenticeship advocate Ryan Craig after Trump’s budget was published. That’s a charitable assessment, presuming that some hand inside the White House or congressional majority is sincerely interested in expanding job opportunities. If there were, concrete action could be taken right now, with real money in the One Big Beautiful Bill for good-quality workforce training programs or constructive Job Corps reforms.  

Trump understands the crude culture war politics of education. Vocational education is manly and leads to jobs that make real things. Liberal arts degrees are for wimpy trust fund babies who don’t contribute to society and don’t deserve support from taxpayer dollars. So, express support for the former and disparage the latter.  

In reality, we need federal support for all kinds of education. There is more than one way to make a living and more than one educational pathway to success. A zero-sum approach is needlessly myopic. But calling the Republican education agenda “zero-sum” is far too complementary because in their legislation, budget, and executive actions, there is very little addition and an excess of subtraction. 

The post Trump’s Vocational Education Con  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

When then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton first spoke about the idea for a national service program that eventually became AmeriCorps, the premise was simple: the federal government would help young people pay down their college loans if they engaged in public service for a year. AmeriCorps represented a civic call to action to young people from all backgrounds to improve their communities and consider a career in public service. Yet, when I signed up for AmeriCorps, I found the reality of the program to be very different from this grand vision. 

In 2019, I began my AmeriCorps service, excited to be assigned to a partner nonprofit in Upper Manhattan, organizing tenants to fight back against abusive landlords. When I collected my paycheck for my first paid position in public service, my wage was just over $7 an hour—not only less than minimum wage in New York City, where I lived, but also a 50-percent pay cut from my previous job as a bartender. 

I joined AmeriCorps for the same reasons that so many young Americans do: because I was drawn by the desire to serve and enter a career in public service. I deeply enjoyed helping community members request repairs, file complaints with the city, and prepare for legal action against neglectful landlords. I also helped organize community events and assisted with initiatives to improve neighborhood parks. And while I loved the work, I was constantly reminded of the financial hardship the program created for its corps members. 

Fortunately, I could live with my parents rent-free during my service; otherwise, the program would have been financially impossible. Other members of my program were not so lucky. Some took on multiple jobs to supplement the low living stipend, while others were housing insecure or resided in less-than-ideal living situations. 

Beyond the low living stipend, the program did little to prepare us for a career after our service. Our only support came from outdated resume-building workshops that most members I spoke with found unhelpful. I found this troubling. If AmeriCorps aims to create the next generation of civic-minded public servants, corps members need career support and professional development beyond basic training.

A few months before the end of my service year, the nonprofit where I worked received a grant, allowing them to hire additional full-time staff. They offered me a job (paying more than double my AmeriCorps living stipend) if I could start on a relatively quick timeline. Excited by the opportunity, I informed the AmeriCorps program staff, assuming such an offer was the ideal endpoint for a term of service. Instead, they told me that to take the job, I would have to resign from AmeriCorps, forfeiting my education award because I had not technically completed the full year. I didn’t want to give up the job offer, complete the program, and begin the job search anew while ineligible for unemployment assistance. So I chose to quit AmeriCorps, grateful for the opportunities it provided me but frustrated that it failed to set me up for a career after service.

AmeriCorps needs to embrace equity-based reforms if it hopes to be an accessible path into public service for young Americans from all backgrounds. Chief among these reforms is the need to raise the living stipend. There was a glimmer of hope this past year—a proposal to include AmeriCorps in the Build Back Better agenda, along with congressional funding to create a new Civilian Climate Corps (CCC). This funding would have increased the number of service members, raised the AmeriCorps minimum wage to $15/hour, and provided billions for its administrative needs. Unfortunately, the funding for AmeriCorps and the CCC was cut from the final iteration of the reconciliation package, the Inflation Reduction Act. 

Last month, I released a report for Next100, a startup think tank working to diversify the policy sector and empower impacted communities to develop policy, outlining steps that the agency, Congress, and the Biden administration should take to advance workforce development in the program. One of the major burdens stopping AmeriCorps programs from offering adequate workforce development is the 80/20 rule, which states that members can spend no more than 20 percent of their overall service time on educational and development activities. Intended to keep participants service-oriented, the rule has adversely resulted in many AmeriCorps programs struggling to train their members, offer skill building, and provide adequate workforce development opportunities within the time allowed by this rule. To remedy this, the AmeriCorps agency, with Congressional authorization, should exclude training that targets post-service career development from the 20 percent cap. Moreover, the agency should create a “Workforce Development Program Track” that AmeriCorps grant recipients can opt into. Within this track, eligible programs would be exempt from the requirements of the 80/20 rule and instead would be responsible for meeting certain professional development goals, such as providing a useful credential, working with a high-need population, or tracking post-service outcomes for members. 

The AmeriCorps federal agency should also begin collecting and tracking data on post-service outcomes for AmeriCorps members, including how long it takes for graduates to find a job or postsecondary educational opportunity after their service, what they are paid in those positions, and whether they stay in public service. Such data would help the agency better understand which of its programs are most successful in connecting members with professional or educational opportunities after their service year and empower programs to improve their workforce development training. In doing so, AmeriCorps must be mindful that many grantee organizations are already overwhelmed by its grant requirements and seek to not only streamline this data collection but also offer additional sources of funding to cover the costs of increased reporting requirements, perhaps through a new data collection pilot program.

Lastly, AmeriCorps should embrace interagency partnerships to strengthen workforce development, taking advantage of existing programs. The agency could partner with the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), for example, to identify opportunities to braid together federal funding streams, combining AmeriCorps funding with DOL funding sources such as employment and training administration programs, dislocated workers grants, and reentry employment programs. Doing so would allow participants to gain the benefits of AmeriCorps service while also receiving the training, workforce development, and wraparound services already funded by the DOL.

I joined AmeriCorps for all of the reasons President Clinton laid out so many years ago—because I wanted to help the most vulnerable members of my community and begin what I hoped would be a career-long journey in public service. AmeriCorps can still live up to those grand ideals, but only if the agency, Congress, and the Biden administration embrace workforce development best practices and pay corps members better wages. With these changes, the program can truly be an accessible, equitable, and empowering pathway for young people to start their careers in public service.

The post AmeriCorps Must Embrace Workforce Development appeared first on Washington Monthly.