With Crossed Wires and Late Funding, Some Call Ed Move to Labor a ‘Muddle’

Linda Jacobson — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 16:29:40 +0000

States typically receive some of their federal education funds in July — enough to hire staff, run summer learning programs and train teachers before the school year begins.

But it took months for some states to access millions of dollars for career and technical education this year after the Department of Labor , part of the Trump administration’s plan to splinter and ultimately dismantle the Department of Education. The Labor Department’s grant system didn’t recognize state education agencies’ bank accounts.

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“We were in this endless loop of having to re-verify our account number,” said Richard Kincaid, assistant state superintendent of college and career pathways at the Maryland State Department of Education. “It never seemed to take in the system.”

Maryland used state funds to fill the gap while it waited on $22 million in reimbursements. But the glitch, some argue, doesn’t bode well for when the Labor Department begins dispersing funds from Title I, the largest federal education program. The annual budget for Title I is $18 billion, compared to $1.4 billion for , which funds CTE. Title I serves 26 million low-income students, covering salaries, tutoring programs and classroom materials.

An , obtained by the website Government Executive, underscored the difficulties, calling the shift of CTE a “miniscule” task compared to what lies ahead. “Larger formula grants and competitive grants are going to be much more difficult to migrate,” the document said.

Beyond technical difficulties, educators say the Labor and Education departments have such vastly different missions that they worry about the message the Trump administration is sending by putting K-12 programs in an agency focused on getting jobless adults into the workforce.

“We’re not talking about how to support a 28-year-old walking into an American job center looking for the next thing,” Kinkaid said. “We’re talking about kids.”

The Education Department last week unveiled six interagency agreements with four other federal agencies as part of the Trump administration’s plan to wind down an agency that it argues was unconstitutional to begin with.

“Let’s make sure that that grant money that’s coming from the federal government is getting in [states’] hands as efficiently as possible,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said during a White House briefing Thursday. “We don’t want teachers having to spend their time and money on regulatory compliance.”

But for some state directors like Kinkaid, the result has been frustrating.

The administration, he said, has “asked state CTE programs to essentially fly for the past six months without air traffic control.”

‘Fruitful partnership’

Officials downplayed the initial rough spots, saying the transition of CTE, adult education and family literacy programs to the Labor Department has been relatively smooth. They worked with nine states to resolve the account number problem. During a call with reporters Tuesday, a senior department official said the administration expects a “similar fruitful partnership” when it merges other K-12 programs into the Labor Department.

State leaders, the official promised, would still be able to rely on “the expertise and concierge-level service” they expect. As of Thursday, staff housed in the Labor Department had processed 568 payment requests totaling over $227 million for 40 unique states and territories, according to an email from a Labor official.

But at least one state, Rhode Island, was still hitting roadblocks as of Friday.

“We are receiving error messages indicating that our organization name does not match the name on record,” said Rhode Island Department of Education spokesman Victor Morente. He said he expected the issue to be fixed this week. “This situation underscores the challenges that abrupt changes within federal departments can create.”

Lawmakers heard about the rocky start last week.

“Operationally, it is a muddle,” Braden Goetz told the . He spent 26 years in the Office of Career, Technical and Adult Education and now works as a senior policy advisor at New America, a left-leaning think tank. “I don’t understand how the work gets done. When Secretary McMahon makes decisions, does she call the Secretary of Labor and ask her to communicate that down the chain?”

Braden Goetz, right, a former CTE official in the U.S. Department of Education, testified before the House education committee Wednesday. Kristi Rice, a cybersecurity teacher at Spotsylvania High School in Virginia, also testified. (House Committee on Education and Workforce)

An Education Department spokesperson said staff reached out to all grantees about requesting CTE funds from the new grant system and has yet to hear from five of them.

“It is common for states to not draw down funds for several months for a variety of state-driven reasons,” the official said. The California, Michigan and Wyoming education departments told �� they haven’t had any trouble getting their CTE funds.

‘Bureaucracy will remain’

John Pallasch served as assistant secretary of the Employment and Training Administration, the Labor office to which K-12 programs are moving, during Trump’s first term. He said any hiccups are likely to be temporary and that the Labor Department “is pretty good at grants management.”

Some observers said shuffling staff and programs from one agency to another doesn’t go far enough.

“The Education Department still retains many functions,” Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the libertarian Cato Institute, wrote in . “So bureaucracy will remain, and the Constitution will continue to be violated.”

From Kinkaid’s perspective in Maryland, states have lost the strong working relationship they had with CTE staff at the Education Department. The team is down from 15 staffers to about five. There’s been “little to no communication since the movement happened,” he said. In addition, a lot of state CTE directors are relatively new and need guidance on how to comply with regulations, said Amy Loyd, former assistant secretary for the CTE and adult education office during the Biden administration.

The Employment and Training Administration manages about $3 to $4 billion in grants annually — a fraction of the $28 billion the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education administers.

In a , Angela Hanks, acting assistant secretary of that division from 2021 to 2022, described moving K-12 programs into the office like “having a frog carry a camel on its back.”

A few of the office’s existing grants focus on youth, but those target teens and young adults who fit “quite a different profile from the students who are served by Title I,” Hanks, now at the left-leaning Century Foundation, told ��. Job Corps helps 16- to 24-year-olds find employment, while teaches vocational skills for “in-demand industries” like construction and hospitality.

Loyd, now CEO at All4Ed, an advocacy organization, sees a similar mismatch with moving adult education programs to the Labor Department.

“Many of these older adults came to adult education services to strengthen their own literacy because they … want to be able to help their grandkids with homework,” she said. “They’re 72; they don’t want a workforce credential. They want to be better readers so they can read to their grandkids.”

Several of the federal K-12 grants are complicated and depend on calculations year to year to ensure payments to districts are accurate. , for example, requires annual counts of military-connected students who attend schools on or near bases.

“The suggestion that these programs are on autopilot and [the Education Department] just flips a switch to flow the money to states and districts is a fundamental misunderstanding,” said Danny Carlson, who served as deputy assistant secretary of policy and programs in the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education during the Biden administration. He’s now executive director of Learning First Alliance, a network that includes administrator associations, teachers unions and the National PTA.

In addition, McMahon tried to lay off 132 of the 185 remaining elementary and secondary employees during the shutdown. A the layoffs, and the agreement to reopen the government forced the secretary to bring the employees back to work, at least until the end of January. But it’s unclear whether she plans to try to terminate them again.

After 10 months of canceled grants, temporary funding freezes and other disruptions, some district leaders are growing accustomed to the uncertainty.

“I expect Labor will have a hard time managing Title I allocations for next year, but the administration is trying to do that,” said Jeremy Vidito, chief financial officer for the Detroit Public Schools. “They want the system to fail so they can … shift funds to private schools or just give the money back to taxpayers.”

Perkins V funds support programs like those at the Carroll County Career and Tech Center in Maryland. (Maryland State Department of Education)

Pallasch, the former assistant labor secretary, said he supports integrating not just CTE, but all education programs into the Labor Department.

“We’re all pulling in the same direction,” he said. “Whether we’re talking K-12, community college or, quite frankly, Harvard and Yale, those are just job training programs. We are training folks to have the skills to be able to function in an organization.”

But Kinkaid and fear that the move to the Labor Department takes the field back to a time when some students were “tracked” into vocational courses without rigorous academic content.

There are growing efforts to expand apprenticeships and other opportunities for students who might not want to go to college. But for decades, Kinkaid said, the CTE field has tried to “shrug off” the stigma that career-focused instruction was only for lower-performing students.

“We may intentionally or unintentionally recreate that old system where low-income students and students of color were funneled into limited, low-mobility job paths,” he said. “This is exactly what the modern CTE system was designed to prevent.”

Department of Labor – ��������

With Crossed Wires and Late Funding, Some Call Ed Move to Labor a ‘Muddle’

‘Fruitful partnership’

‘Bureaucracy will remain’

Department of Labor – ��