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POLICY INSIGHT
BEYOND THE NUMBERS

Bernstein: Trump’s Budget Wouldn’t Develop the Workforce

| By CBPP

The White House has deemed this "workforce development week," but President Trump's budget would drastically cut many job training and education programs and would fail to create new job opportunities, CBPP Senior Fellow Jared Bernstein points out in his latest Washington Post "PostEverything" blog post.

Here are some excerpts from Bernstein's post:

The Trump budget would immediately cut the Labor Department’s Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act grants to states and local communities by 40 percent. . . . [T]hese cuts come on top of hits already taken in this part of the budget since 2010. In addition, a fund that helps workers who have been displaced by natural disasters and mass layoffs would lose almost 50 percent of its funding, and money dedicated to job training for farmworkers would be eliminated entirely. . . .

The Trump budget would eliminate grants that support after-school programs for low-income students, reduce funding for career and technical education by 13 percent, and reduce funding for adult education by 16 percent. Grants and loans that help students attend college would take a hit as well. Work-study programs would be cut in half. . . .

There’s no job-inducing infrastructure plan, and the shell of the one the administration has touted is mostly a big tax cut to developers of a small subset of projects, those that spin off user fees. They won’t raise the federal minimum wage, stuck at $7.25 in the 21 states that still haven’t raised it on their own. We know that there are parts of the country that even as we close in on full employment, are still left behind, but there are no plans to either bring opportunity there, say in the form of direct job creation, or to help such families move to opportunity.

Read his full post here.