Monday morning musings for workplace watchers.
Fixing the Job Training Jumble| Dems Push Back on OFFCP Cuts
Rebecca Rainey: President
Trump signed an executive order tasking the secretaries of Labor, Education, and Commerce with developing a plan to “integrate” and “streamline” job training grant programs across the three agencies.
While the plan hasn’t yet been written, those who have worked with federal job training funds say the order’s goals of simplifying performance measures and refocusing career and technical education funding toward the registered apprenticeship system would be welcomed.
“We’ve been working in a system that does have this sort of fragmented quality, and the notion of bringing together these departments for more coherence around their support for apprenticeship seems like a very promising development, we’ll see what comes with it,” said John Colburn, executive director of Apprenticeships for America, which advocates for the growth of job training programs in the US economy.
Organizations that participate in these programs also say Trump’s endorsement of the registered apprenticeship system was an important signal about his administration’s policy plans for job training.
During the first Trump administration, the Department of Labor implemented an “Industry Recognized Apprenticeship Program” that allowed businesses to stand up their own alternative job training programs that would be monitored and approved by third parties. Unions and Democrats had complained the model would undermine the value of the government’s nationally-recognized registered apprenticeship credential.
The program was scrapped during the Biden administration, but many expected it would make a comeback during Trump 2.0.
“There is work to be done in the registered apprenticeship system to improve efficiency, to make the registration process easier,” Colburn said. “But by focusing on the registered apprenticeship system that gives us some forward momentum here.”
However, the Trump administration is already facing both timing and legal hurdles to implementing its “Comprehensive Workforce Strategy.” Early last week, the DOL dismissed Amy Simon, acting leader of its Employment and Training Administration which oversees the registered apprenticeship system.
And Trump provided his administration with just 90 days to draft a plan on combining billions of dollars in programs from three separate agencies into a single system.
“This is the type of thing that would take years in some circumstances, and probably its own sort of comprehensive bill from the Hill to do right and to do well,” said Nick Beadle, a consultant who formerly worked as a program and grants attorney at the DOL.
The funds for these job training programs are also provided in congressional appropriations that direct the money to specific agencies for specific uses.
It’s unclear “if you could do that without explicit congressional authority,” said Beadle. “So that is a significant challenge.”
Rebecca Klar: House Democrats are pushing back on the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to labor agencies policing workplace discrimination.
Reps. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) and Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), ranking members of the House Education and the Workforce and Oversight and Government Reform committees, will send a letter Monday requesting information about the scope of the administration’s cuts to the DOL’s contractor watchdog.
The letter also asks the new director of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, Catherine Eschbach, to provide detailed information about how many of the agency’s compliance cases, conciliation agreements, audits, and investigations were ceased since Jan. 20.
“Americans deserve fairness and respect in any workplace, especially workplaces funded by taxpayer dollars in service to the country, yet these actions undermine equal opportunity for federal contract workers and leave them vulnerable to discrimination,” they wrote in a letter exclusively shared with Bloomberg Law.
Trump’s Jan. 21 executive order rescinded the decades-old EO 11246 that established most of the OFCCP’s power to audit federal contractor’s hiring and pay practices for potential discrimination.
In a memo to employees in March, Eschbach said the agency would review its remaining statutory obligations to enforce laws that protect against discrimination of veteran and disabled workers.
The OFCCP put the vast majority of staff across its field offices and national branch on administrative leave April 16, according to an email viewed by Bloomberg Law.
A Feb. 25 DOL memo proposed cuts to 90% of the agency’s workforce.
The House Democrats’ letter to OFCCP followed one Scott led on March 26 to the acting chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission about eight of the agency’s offices placed on a Department of Government Efficiency list of lease terminations.
Acting Chair Andrea Lucas told the lawmakers the EEOC is committed to working with the General Services Administration as they assess office space needs, according to a copy of her April 11 response reviewed by Bloomberg Law.
Any changes to jurisdictional boundaries of EEOC field activity is subject to commission approval. The EEOC currently can’t hold any votes since it lacks a quorum after Trump fired two Democratic commissioners in January.
Throughout the process with GSA, Lucas said she has been “transparent” that the agency will follow all “internal and external process and requirements,” including a majority vote of the commission.
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