Supporters hailed the change as a necessary streamlining while critics warned it could undermine the program’s educational mission.
Under the interagency agreement, originally signed in May but delayed by a court injunction until last week, programs for adult and family literacy funded through Title II of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act and CTE programs funded by the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act will be affected by the change. ED staff will still help oversee Perkins and Title II grants, while DOL will assume operational control of grant competitions and technical assistance for those programs. DOL is also tasked with integrating ED programs into its larger suite of labor-related programs.
Officials said the partnership will reduce bureaucracy and better align workforce services, offering a unified system for job training programs.
“The current structure with various federal agencies each managing pieces of the federal workforce portfolio is inefficient and duplicative,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a public statement. “Support from the Department of Labor in administering the Department of Education’s workforce programs is a commonsense step in streamlining these programs to better serve students, families and educators.”
Education and technology advocates, however, expressed concern for program quality. The Association for Career and Technical Education (ACTE) and Advance CTE issued a joint statement critiquing the interagency agreement’s consideration for populations impacted by the programs.
“Rather than creating innovation and process improvements within CTE, this action would instead create confusion and produce new administrative inefficiencies,” the statement said.
The statement also said moving CTE programs out of the purview of ED risks undermining their historical focus on education beyond mere job training.
The Carl D. Perkins Act is one of the government’s primary vehicles for funding CTE programs across the country. It was first enacted in 1984, with similar subsequent acts following, including the current Perkins V act passed under Trump in 2018. The law was created to modernize workforce training in schools and colleges to ensure students could gain job skills relevant to a changing economy. According to ED, Congress has been providing $1.4 billion annually for states to build career-focused programs.
Tile II of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) is a key federal program for adult basic education and literacy. It was designed to help adults out of school acquire education and skills necessary for economic self-sufficiency. The program offers grants to providers that teach adults reading, math and writing skills.
“Overseeing these very different programs requires very different types of expertise and system approaches to meet the needs of these unique populations,” the ACTE and Advance CTE joint statement said.
This partnership rollout comes amid broader changes to federal education funding and oversight. This month, 24 states sued to release nearly $7 billion in education and job-training grants frozen by the Trump administration pending workforce revamps.
