With the Supreme Court on Monday clearing the way for the Trump administration to shrink the Education Department’s workforce, the department on Tuesday announced plans for the Department of Labor (DOL) to manage its adult education and career and technical education (CTE) programs.
The Education Department (ED) said in a release that DOL will take on a “greater role” in administering the adult education and family literacy programs funded under Title II of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) and career and technical education programs funded by the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act (Perkins V). ED noted that it will maintain all statutory responsibilities and positions, policy authority and oversight of these programs.
Both agencies’ secretaries, Linda McMahon at ED and Lori Chavez-DeRemer at DOL, noted that various federal agencies each manage parts of the federal workforce portfolio, which is inefficient and duplicative. Bundling ED’s workforce-related programs under DOL is a “commonsense step” in making the programs more efficient, McMahon said.
ED and DOL will provide states with additional guidance in the coming weeks.
Setting a plan into motion
In May, both agencies agreed to an interagency partnership, which was subsequently paused when a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit that had been filed. Monday’s high court ruling allowed the partnership to continue, according to federal officials.
Under the partnership, DOL will provide day-to-day administration of ED’s Perkins and WIOA Title II programs in addition to its own workforce development programs. ED contends that administering Perkins V and the selected WIOA programs through DOL will “facilitate streamlined services for states and grantees, such as allowing for a unified state plan portal and consistent timelines for submitting the required state plans for WIOA and Perkins.”
States have been able to submit combined Perkins and WIOA plans since 2020. However, without cross-trained federal staff and integrated technical assistance, “these programs have remained siloed at the federal level, which has limited usefulness of combined Perkins and WIOA state plans for the states,” ED said in an accompanying fact sheet.
Better coordination will hopefully yield better results for program participants, the department said, pointing to low success rates among the programs: only 60% of adult education participants complete the program, 33% of adult education program participants are employed six months after completing the program, and 35% of adult education participants are employed a year after completing the program.
ED said it hopes best practices emerging from the partnership will help guide lawmakers on how to improve workforce development programs as Congress works to reauthorize WIOA.
Dems balk at plan
When the interagency agreement came to light in June, congressional Democrats quickly called the move illegal.
“Perkins CTE and adult education are education programs whose purpose is to expand educational opportunities to youth and adults,” House and Senate Democratic leaders said in a June 18 letter to McMahon. “Any attempt to move these programs to Labor would fundamentally alter the purposes of those programs and risk turning them into short-term job training programs, no different than those that are funded under WIOA. Most importantly, it would upend decades of work that took place at the state and local level to embed CTE programs into secondary and postsecondary offerings and improve the quality of CTE and adult education.”
If the Trump administration has ideas for changing which agency should administer CTE programs, then it needs to propose them to Congress through the normal legislative process, the Democrats said.
Joining the lawmakers in opposition to the plan are several CTE advocates, including the Association for Career and Technical Education and Advance CTE.
States sue for the withheld $7B
At the same time, 24 states on Monday teamed to sue ED to release more than $7 billion in grant funding the Trump administration has withheld for K-12 and adult education programs, which help adults build literacy and job-readiness skills. They contend that the refusal to disperse the funds — which were to be distributed July 1 ahead of the new academic year — violates federal laws governing funding processes.
ED has argued that the grants — which go to after-school programs, teacher training, migrant education and English-language learning and other initiatives — are under review for compliance with President Donald Trump’s priorities. It has not released information on the duration or scope of the review.
“This illegal and unjustified funding freeze will be devastating for students and families nationwide, especially for those who rely on these programs for childcare or to learn English,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said Monday in a press briefing pertaining to the suit. “Congress allocated these funds, and the law requires that they be delivered. We will not allow this administration to rewrite the rules to punish the communities it doesn’t like.”
The attorneys general from the states joining the lawsuit said they hope to secure a preliminary injunction in a few days. If the funding freeze continues, states like New York would have to conduct “large scale and unplanned layoffs,” according to state officials.
