At a time when workforce boards are being asked to produce better outcomes with fewer resources, the federal government has proposed sweeping changes to the rules governing federal grants.
The National Association of Workforce Boards (NAWB) strongly opposes these proposed changes.
Not because we oppose accountability. Quite the opposite. Workforce boards understand better than anyone that public dollars carry public trust. Every day, boards across the country are accountable to taxpayers, local elected officials, governors, state workforce agencies, federal partners, employers, and the workers who depend on us. We welcome oversight. We welcome transparency. We welcome responsible stewardship of federal funds.
What we cannot support are regulations that increase administrative burden, associated compliance costs, and disruption of critical services all without providing any tangible benefits or improvements to the current regulatory framework for federal grant funding.
If adopted as written, these proposed changes would make it harder for workforce boards—and virtually every organization or entity that receives federal grant funding directly or indirectly—to focus on the work Congress intended those dollars to accomplish. Instead of investing more time connecting workers to careers, helping employers address workforce shortages, supporting veterans, serving opportunity youth, strengthening apprenticeship programs, or responding to local economic challenges, organizations will be forced to devote even more time to navigating new compliance requirements, documenting routine activities, and managing additional administrative risk. Here are just a few examples of how this may play out in practice:
Employer Services
Instead of spending time meeting with employers to understand hiring needs, business services staff would spend additional hours documenting expenditures, justifying payments, and responding to expanded oversight requirements. That means fewer employer visits, fewer customized hiring events, and slower responses to businesses trying to fill critical positions.
Training Contracts
Boards may become more cautious about entering into innovative training partnerships or multi-year contracts because of increased uncertainty surrounding grant administration and changing award conditions. Programs that help employers quickly upskill workers could take longer to launch—or never move forward at all.
Professional Development
If conference attendance, professional memberships, publications, and training require additional approvals or become unallowable under certain circumstances, workforce professionals may lose access to the very professional development, technical assistance, and best practices that improve program performance and strengthen accountability. Indeed, current law authorizes these activities and encourages them throughout the public workforce system.
That’s incredibly important because Congress generally understands why teachers, lawyers, and healthcare workers need continuing education. Workforce professionals are no different.
Rural Communities
Smaller and rural workforce boards often operate with very limited administrative staff. New compliance responsibilities may fall on the same employees responsible for business engagement, program oversight, fiscal management, and grant administration, stretching already limited capacity even further.
Customer Wait Times
Every hour staff spend responding to new administrative requirements is an hour not spent helping jobseekers build resumes, connect with employers, enroll in training, or receive career coaching. Collectively these proposals could reduce the amount of staff time available for direct customer service.
Board Governance
Local board members are volunteers drawn from business, education, labor, and community leadership. Increased uncertainty surrounding federal requirements and compliance obligations are likely to shift board meetings away from strategic discussions about workforce needs and toward risk management, compliance, and administrative oversight.
Small Nonprofits
Many nonprofits that provide services to our system operate on extremely thin administrative margins. New documentation, payment justification, and monitoring requirements could make participation in federally funded partnerships financially unsustainable, reducing local capacity to deliver services.
This change is the wrong direction.
For years, workforce boards have been challenged to become more agile, more innovative, more responsive to employers, and more focused on outcomes. We have embraced that challenge. Across the country, boards have built partnerships, leveraged funding, modernized service delivery, and demonstrated that local leadership produces results.
These proposed regulations move us in the opposite direction.
Rather than trusting local communities to solve local workforce challenges, they centralize authority, expand administrative oversight, and layer new compliance obligations onto a system that is already operating with limited administrative resources and capacity. At a time when employers are struggling to find talent and communities are asking the workforce system to do more than ever before, we should be removing unnecessary barriers—not creating new ones.
One of the most frustrating aspects of this proposal is that it comes at precisely the wrong moment. Workforce boards are already navigating historic labor market change, rapid advances in artificial intelligence, demographic shifts, persistent workforce shortages, and growing expectations from employers and policymakers alike. Every conversation we have with Congress, the Administration, and business leaders centers on one theme: produce better outcomes, move faster, innovate more, and do it with the same, or in most cases fewer, resources. It is difficult to reconcile that expectation with a proposal that asks local organizations to absorb another significant layer of administrative responsibility without providing additional capacity to implement it.
On Wednesday, July 1st, NAWB along with NAWDP, released an Advocacy Toolkit for workforce boards and professionals breaking down the issue and providing guidance on how to fight back.
In this blog I’ll be more direct:
Policymakers cannot appreciate the consequences of this proposal if they only hear from Washington.
You may think that local leaders are well aware of this proposal, but over the last two weeks I have traveled to multiple events with county commissioners and mayors from a number of States, and even our Senior Director of Government Relations and Advocacy, Gail Silberglied has met with congressional offices where awareness of the OMB proposal is minimal. So far.
At the local level, our partners at the National Association of Counties, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and the National League of Cities mounted a robust response, including producing a webinar for local leaders, and urging their members to submit public comments. But these local leaders who navigate hundreds of local issues also need to hear from constituents and organizations responsible for implementing workforce policy about how it will impact their communities.
The July 13 comment deadline for the Federal Register is important, but it is not the finish line. OMB is required to review and address substantive comments and consider changes based on public feedback prior to the October 1 implementation. Congressional oversight will continue, and the opportunity to shape the outcome of this proposal will continue. Submit your comments before the deadline, but don’t stop there. Continue raising this issue in every meeting with your Members of Congress, your Governor, your local elected officials, and your community partners.
The workforce system has spent decades demonstrating that local leadership, local accountability, and local innovation produce better outcomes than one-size-fits-all solutions. We should not allow that progress to be undermined by regulations that add cost, complexity, and uncertainty.
NAWB is committed to opposing these proposed changes, and we need you to stand with us. Because this isn’t simply about grant regulations. It’s about preserving the ability of local communities to build the workforce they need to compete and ensuring that every federal dollar is spent where it creates the greatest value: serving people, strengthening businesses, and growing local economies.
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