The U.S. Department of Justice agreed Aug. 10 to stop efforts to indefinitely “pause” operations at 99 youth training centers in nearly every state, reaching a with seven students backed by the Public Citizen Litigation Group and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The settlement lets the centers — which provide job training, dormitories and living expenses for 25,000 low-income students between 16 and 24 every year — continue serving students. It also ends worries the centers would close with students still in the middle of training for fields that include construction, health care, manufacturing and transportation.

“(The) settlement puts an end to the unlawful threat hanging over Job Corps students’ heads for the last year,” said Adam Pulver, a lawyer for the students.

In court filings, students told stories of being shut out of their dorms or being ordered to leave their Job Corps campus last year after the Trump administration ordered the centers to stop operating with one month’s notice in May, 2025.

“I want nothing more than to stay and finish my program, so I intend to remain on campus and attend classes until I am forced to leave,” Maddex Noah Davis-Newman, 19, a trainee at the Tongue Point Job Corps center in Oregon told the court last June. “In the past two weeks, I have lost a lot of friends here who had to return to abusive homes or are back living on the streets.”

Others told the court they had dropped out of high school a few years earlier, or been kicked out of their parents’ homes, before Job Corps offered them shelter, food and training.

 â€œIf not for Job Corps, I would have become homeless,” Abigail Shauger, 19, a student at the Job Corps center in Grand Rapids, Michigan, told the court last June.

“If the shutdown continues, I will not be able to earn my trade certificate in the (Certified Nursing Assistant) program despite my training,” she added. “I was so close, with only two months left till my tests.”

The U.S. Department of Labor, which oversees the program, referred questions to the Department of Justice, which did not respond to questions from ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. Administration officials have said since last May that Job Corps does not bring enough benefit to students to justify costing more than $1.6 billion a year.

“Job Corps was created to help young adults build a pathway to a better life through education, training, and community,” Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer “However
the program is no longer achieving the intended outcomes that students deserve.”

She pointed to a study finding that the program costs more than $80,000 per student per year, with just a 39% graduation rate and participants earning less than $17,000 a year, on average.

Job Corps has also long been on the list of programs conservatives consider wasteful, with the Heritage Foundation criticizing its several years ago because of low high school and college graduation rates and small wage increases for participants.

The non-profit , saying the data in that study was distorted by the pandemic, that the cost per graduate is about $57,000 and earnings average about $31,000.

Pulver said the government’s failure to follow shutdown procedures spelled out in law doomed its attempt. The administration had ordered the centers to stop operating with just a month’s notice. But Pulver said federal law lays out an orderly path to closing Job Corps centers over time, if the program is to be cut, so that students are not abruptly turned away with training half-finished.

He called the administration’s attempt to “suspend” operations while seeking to wipe out the program’s budget a “sleight of hand” to avoid public debate and closure procedures. That let the students win a U.S. District Court ruling in July, 2025, blocking the suspension until the case was resolved.

“I think the judge in this case agreed that suspending something indefinitely, with no intention to ever reopen it, is closing it,” Pulver said.

The administration also did not succeed in its hope of removing funding for Job Corps from the federal budget. through at least June 2027.

Last fall, U.S. Department of Education officials that transferring major K-12 programs to the Department of Labor would be “more difficult” than its earlier move of career-and-technical education programs to that agency.

They’re not even going to try this year. 

To the relief of state leaders and education advocates, the department told education chiefs Friday that they would continue to access millions of dollars in Title I and other “formula” grants under the Every Student Succeeds Act through the system that’s already familiar to state staff. 

“We have heard your concerns,” Kirstin Baesler, assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, told chiefs on Friday. The pause on handing that responsibility over to the Labor Department means districts won’t need to worry about funds arriving in time to plan for next school year — a situation that caught schools off guard last summer when the administration held up funding for a month.

Sticking with the Education Department’s system, Baesler wrote, would give everyone involved “more time to collaborate on procedures, processes and training to ensure states are set up to successfully receive and draw down formula funds.” 

In recent weeks Education Secretary Linda McMahon and former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez DeRemer have jointly announced four smaller grant competitions related to , school leadership, and charter schools. Those funds will flow through a Labor Department grant platform. But some observers suggest the department’s decision to hang on to its largest K-12 program is an acknowledgement that the transition hasn’t been smooth. Title I serves roughly 25 million students.

“That’s an important milestone to miss and a sign that the partnership has been rocky and poorly executed,” said Braden Goetz, a senior policy adviser at New America, a left-of-center think tank. He previously directed the policy and research team focusing on career, technical and adult education at the Education Department, the first office to be transferred to the Labor Department.

State officials reported numerous complications last year in trying to access CTE funds, like error messages in the system. The Illinois State Department of Education waited several weeks to get its funding and spokeswoman Lindsay Record said communication from the Department of Labor often came “with little notice and without the benefit of the Department of Education’s expertise in overseeing education programs.”  

States don’t want a repeat of that situation when they try to pull down roughly $28 billion in funds this summer. 

Competitive grants, like the ones McMahon and Chavez-DeRemer recently announced, are one thing. But Title I and other formula programs for all states “are a different, and much larger and more essential, responsibility altogether,” said Amy Loyd, president and CEO of All4Ed, an advocacy group. 

The Rhode Island Department of Education was another agency that experienced difficulties using the Labor Department’s system last year. Spokesman Victor Morente said Commissioner AngĂ©lica Infante-Green appreciates Baesler allowing “additional time for preparedness” with the formula funds, but added that “further clarity on how the new interagency plans will be implemented is absolutely necessary to avoid disruption and confusion related to funding concerns.”

Along with state officials, staff within the Education Department “persistently communicated” to leaders that moving to Labor’s grant system “would cause significant problems for states and students,” said Rachel Gittleman, president of the union representing department employees. 

Baesler said she would discuss the matter further with chiefs when she meets with them virtually May 7.

House committee vote

Congress also expressed concerns last year with the batch of “interagency agreements” McMahon has initiated as she works to eliminate the department. Members warned that the actions would “create inefficiencies” and “cause delays and administrative challenges.”

The agreements are illegal according to a group of states and districts that have the dismantling of the department. But on Tuesday, the House education committee took the first step toward writing those agreements into law. 

The Republican majority passed a bill that formally moves adult education programs to the Labor Department. Rep. Tim Walberg of Michigan, who chairs the committee, said the move makes it easier for adults to “move from basic skills to training to employment within a more coordinated system.”

Goetz disagreed. In , he said taking the program out of the Education Department changes it into “a funnel to low-wage jobs” and turns it over to those without expertise in reading and math.

Even so, aside from Baesler’s Friday announcement, he doesn’t expect the administration to slow down its work to distribute education programs to other agencies. Chavez-DeRemer’s resignation this week, following that she used Labor funds for personal trips and had an affair with an employee, could even accelerate the process, he said.

Savannah Newhouse, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, dismissed the idea that Chavez-DeRemer’s actions got in the way of carrying out President Donald Trump’s executive order to shut down the department. 

“Suggesting one departure would affect these partnerships misunderstands how they’re structured,” she said. “These partnerships are with agencies best equipped to manage federal education programs without disruption.”

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. 

“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?”

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 ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ 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 ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. 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.”

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.”