Legislative Agenda

Fully Fund the Public Workforce System

Funding for the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) has steadily eroded over the last decade, creating significant challenges in meeting the needs of jobseekers, workers, and employers. Inflation in recent years has continued to worsen this trend. Despite these challenges, every dollar invested by the federal government in WIOA generates more than $15 in economic value for our nation. Federal support for WIOA enables workforce boards to leverage additional funding for workforce development, making this one of the most impactful and remunerative investments Congress can make.

NAWB supports a substantial increase in funding for core Title I WIOA funding streams including youth, adults, and dislocated workers – which are funded in the Labor-HHS-Education Appropriations bill – to meet current and future needs of American businesses.

Reject a One-Size-Fits-All Federal WIOA Training Mandate

Individuals served through WIOA often require a variety of supports to complete training and education programs and find and successfully hold a job. Supportive services may include initial assessments, transportation, tool/equipment/uniform purchases, childcare, and other “training-enabling” support. Career services – such as skills assessment, career counseling, and case management – are also essential in ensuring jobseekers find the opportunities that lead to family-sustaining employment.

Several states already have training requirements for WIOA funds but some of these states include great flexibility to ensure that training-related costs, including staff costs, count towards these training requirements.

Workforce development boards also often leverage federal WIOA funding to raise additional resources that are used for training, although recent WIOA reauthorization bills have not recognized these non-federal contributions in the context of proposed training mandates.

NAWB supports efforts to incentivize training within the public workforce system while ensuring completion and success. If this incentivization must include percentage training requirements for WIOA funds, flexibility in defining training costs – to include Supportive Services and Career Services – would ensure both that the needs of the jobseeker are most efficiently and effectively met and that training funds are most efficiently spent.

We also ask Congress to:

Support a Skills-first Agenda

• Promote skills-based hiring initiatives by using linked, open, and interoperable data systems in public workforce programs.
• Expand Pell Grant eligibility for people enrolled in high-quality, shorter-term skills development programs while utilizing existing WIOA processes to ensure these programs align with in-demand careers and wider economic opportunity.
• Provide adequate flexibility for youth work experiences that recognize what these initiatives aim to do and maximize success.

Improve Efficiency

• Provide dedicated funding for one-stop center infrastructure costs, based on actual system needs, and eliminate onerous infrastructure funding agreement provisions in current law that disincentivize state and local collaboration.
• Allow for either a physical or virtual one-stop center according to community needs.
• Create a single point of access for individuals to access training opportunities that are not only funded by WIOA but other federal investments to facilitate a national marketplace for high-quality training opportunities to allow consumers to search for and identify providers that meet their needs.
• Increase allowances for on-the-job and incumbent worker training.
• Allow public outreach and marketing of federally funded workforce initiatives to increase the public’s awareness of and familiarity with these opportunities.
• Clarify that local workforce boards have budgetary authority over the administration of adult, dislocated workers, and youth workforce development activities.
• Allow workforce boards to serve as a One-Stop Operator, which provides a seamless customer-focused service delivery network including workforce development, education, and human services.

Enhance Workforce Data Quality

• Invest in the public workforce system’s capacity to produce and make use of real-time labor market information to ensure workforce boards can make informed decisions about labor trends and business needs.
• Codify and enhance the Workforce Data Quality Initiative to promote data sharing among states and integration of data systems within states.