The Trump administration’s Department of Labor announced on Thursday it would suspend operations of the Job Corps training program, prompting bipartisan criticism.
“The Department should have attempted to fix them but, instead of working with the contractors and helping students, they’ve just decided to send the students home,” Representative Steve Cohen, Democrat of Tennessee, wrote in a statement. “The Department of Labor apparently has no plans for an improved product or a new approach. This careless approach will upset the lives of too many ambitious members of a future workforce, and should be condemned.”
Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, also said she “strongly” opposes pausing the program as part of the administration’s push to cut spending, calling the Job Corps centers in her state “important pillars of support for some of our most disadvantaged young adults.”
The Labor Department announced the shift on Thursday, saying it “reflects the Administration’s commitment to ensure federal workforce investments deliver meaningful results for both students and taxpayers.”
It argued the program, created in 1964 to offer free residential education and job training to low-income teens and young adults, was delivering poor results.
“Job Corps was created to help young adults build a pathway to a better life through education, training, and community,” Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said in a statement announcing the pause, which will occur by the end of June. “However, a startling number of serious incident reports and our in-depth fiscal analysis reveal the program is no longer achieving the intended outcomes that students deserve.”
The Department said the program ran a $140 million deficit last year. In 2023, according to government data, the program spent over $80,000 per pupil to achieve a 38.6 percent graduation rate.
Other critics took issue with the legality of pausing the program, which has served over 2 million people.
“Congress appropriated funding for Job Corps, and the Trump Administration can’t just decide to not spend it because they want to make room for tax cuts for billionaires,” Senator Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin, said in a statement to The Hill.
The administration has pushed for other cuts at the Labor Department, including seeking to cancel leases held by the Mine Safety and Health Administration, though this week it dropped that effort.
The Trump administration’s 2026 budget has proposed cutting 4,000 full-time staffers from the department, about a quarter of its current workforce.
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