Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

18. Department of Labor and Related Agencies · Notable · Needs Congress

Streamline workforce development programs in WIOA reauthorization

Attempted

597 18. Department of Labor and Related Agencies

“Evaluate and streamline workforce development programs, ensuring evidence-based outcomes. In its reauthorization of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), Congress should evaluate and streamline the existing workforce development programs to ensure there is no overlap or fragmentation between programs.”

What has happened

  1. Attempted

    The FY2027 President's Budget carries the consolidation into a formal request: Make America Skilled Again would give states and localities flexibility to spend workforce dollars, paid for by eliminating Job Corps and the Senior Community Service Employment Program, with the Department positioned as "the lead agency overseeing work to prepare Americans for high-paying skilled jobs". Congress has not reauthorized WIOA and enacted none of it.

  2. Attempted

    Executive Order 14278 sections 1 and 3 committed the administration to "consolidate and streamline fragmented Federal workforce development programs" and ordered the Secretaries of Labor, Commerce and Education to report within 90 days on opportunities to integrate systems, on programs that are ineffective or fail to achieve their outcomes with a proposal to reform, redirect or eliminate each, and on "recommendations to further restructure and consolidate programs". An executive route around a WIOA reauthorization Congress has not taken up.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • §3b: executive action on a Requires-Congress ask is attempted where it routes around the statute — which is what these two do. WIOA itself is unamended; no reauthorization bill exists in the 119th Congress (four WIOA bills were introduced, all single-purpose: two on defining “evidence-based”, one on community-college grants, one authorizing a study).
  • Congress’s inaction is recorded in this note rather than as a separate event, per §3b.
Action
other
Object
Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act programs
ID
1644