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APTOPIX Netherlands NATO Summit
Donald Trump is seen being chauffeured from Amsterdam Schiphol Airport to a NATO summit, taking place in The Hague, Netherlands on June 24, 2025.
Hours after federal agents arrested New York City Comptroller Brad Lander for attempting to escort a defendant out of immigration court, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York held a hearing across the street to consider extending a temporary restraining order to delay the “phased pause” of Job Corps centers nationwide. Judge Andrew L. Carter Jr., who granted the initial temporary restraining order on June 4, extended the order through today, June 25, preventing the Labor Department from taking steps to kill a program that has “help[ed] young adults build a pathway to a better life” for 60 years.
That quote, came from the current Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who initiated the dismantling of the Job Corps. In trying to justify the action, Chavez-DeRemer said that “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.”
But the Labor Department’s concerns about the integrity of the program are merely a dog whistle. For years, the Heritage Foundation, the home base of Project 2025, has been at the center of the conservative plot to dismantle the Job Corps, a byproduct of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society policy initiatives. Heritage described the Job Corps in 2023 as “an ineffective federal job-training program that should be eliminated.” Moreover, the White House’s discretionary budget request for the 2026 fiscal year—crafted by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought—seeks to zero out funding for the “financially unsustainable” program, arguing it has also been “plagued by a culture of violence, assault, sex crimes, drug infractions, and death.”
But while the program itself has seen its fair share of challenges, its defenders say that these critiques are exaggerations that minimize the real benefits. “Termination of the Job Corps program is a detriment not only to its students, but also to the American workforce and the communities where Job Corps centers have become revenue generators,” Greg Regan and Shari Semelsberger, president and secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO Transportation Trades Department (TTD), said in a statement last month. TTD has also framed the Job Corps as key to realizing one of President Donald Trump’s stated policy goals: producing a million new active apprentices annually. “Our nation’s investment in Job Corps not only expands our skilled workforce, it ensures these young Americans are less likely to be involved in the criminal justice system or rely on public assistance,” TTD wrote in a letter on June 16.
With more than 300 pre-apprenticeship programs, the Job Corps is the largest residential career training operation in the country. It has long served as a lifeline for at-risk youth, providing them with the means to secure meaningful employment through free housing, education, and training. Upwards of 2 million young people have gone through the Job Corps since its inception in 1964, and more than 60,000 new students are enrolled each year. Currently, there are nearly 25,000 young people on the rolls, and many of them depend on the program for health care, mental health services, and a place to live.
Trump’s Labor Department began tarring and feathering the Job Corps earlier this year, freezing enrollment by halting background checks and canceling procurements, which left centers across the country without internet access.
The decision to halt operations at all 99 contractor-operated Job Corps centers has had a chilling effect on students and staff. According to one plaintiff who spoke to the Prospect on the condition of anonymity, some students have already withdrawn from the program due to uncertainty over their living arrangements, opting to secure coveted homeless shelter beds or other forms of temporary housing rather than holding out for a return to the status quo.
Others are fighting back. On June 18, seven Job Corps students filed a lawsuit against the Labor Department, mounting a separate legal challenge to the agency’s abrupt suspension. Taken together, the lawsuits allege the Labor Department ran afoul of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act—the law requiring advanced notice via the Federal Register and a 30-day public comment period prior to the closure of any Job Corps center—as well as congressional notification requirements.
“The Job Corps program, since its creation by Congress in 1964, has been an important program helping students find housing security and pathways to economic opportunity across the country and particularly in the south, especially for people of color, with nearly half of the participants in the program being Black youth,” said Scott McCoy, deputy legal director at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is representing the students alongside Public Citizen’s Litigation Group.
A sudden and indefinite termination of Job Corps center operations across the country would be devastating for students who are close to completing their training. According to the June 18 lawsuit, one of the plaintiffs, a student enrolled in the Detroit Job Corps Center in Detroit, “will not be able to complete his education and training and continue to reside at the center” if the Labor Department suspends the program. The story is more or less the same for the other student plaintiffs in the case.
In addition to the potential illegality of the Labor Department’s conduct, its justifications for suspending the program are questionable. For one, the agency’s safety concerns may very well be overblown. The National Job Corps Association (NJCA) has asserted that “Job Corps students experience assaults and sexual violence at far lower rates than their peers in their home communities and on college campuses.”
In any case, shuttering Job Corps centers with no clear intention to reopen them will likely endanger more at-risk youth than it will protect.
“As a result of the [Labor] Department’s illegal actions, tens of thousands of young people, including our clients, will lose vital access to housing, health care, and the opportunity to build a more stable future for themselves and their families,” said Adam Pulver, an attorney with Public Citizen Litigation Group and lead counsel for the student plaintiffs. “As directed by Congress, the centers must be kept open and the program must be restored.”
The financial viability argument is also flimsy. The program’s budget has hovered around $1.75 billion for the past several years. Although its deficit is projected to reach $213 million this year, much of that is attributable to failing to increase the budget in line with inflation. For instance, when it comes to masonry training, the outcome of allocating the same amount of money year after year for materials like bricks, stone, and mortar leads to an inevitable shortfall as costs for those items rise.
Flat budgets have caused such problems at the Job Corps that the Biden administration’s Labor Department had to temporarily pause operations at two centers in 2024, while arranging for students enrolled there to complete their training.
Upwards of 2 million young people have gone through the Job Corps since its inception in 1964, and more than 60,000 new students are enrolled each year.
Suggesting that the Job Corps is hemorrhaging taxpayer money neglects the long-term economic benefits of the program, which has improved employment outcomes for at-risk youth and saved taxpayers tens of billions of dollars over the course of their lifetimes, according to NJCA. It also begs the question as to what the Labor Department is spending its money on and why. The agency has backed or outright created numerous interactive, artificial intelligence-enabled career and labor market tools designed to help people explore careers in skilled trades. In recent years, it has spent tens of millions of dollars on these AI tools, including the Workforce Data Quality Initiative grant program, O*NET, and CareerOneStop.
According to Jonas Elmore, national Job Corps director at the International Masonry Institute, the “nuts and bolts” of the program boil down to three concepts: training, job placement, and education. Elmore, who grew up on the South Side of Chicago, graduated from the Job Corps in 1993. “The program completely changed my life,” he told the Prospect.
The Labor Department’s argument neglects to address any of the true costs associated with shutting down the Job Corps, and the ways in which targeted reforms could breathe life into the program. For instance, if the Labor Department sells a Job Corps property, it is required by law to redirect the proceeds from that sale back into the program. “Some Job Corps centers have aged into hotly sought-after properties for redevelopment, while also becoming increasingly difficult facilities to maintain with low congressional appropriations,” Nick Beadle, former chief of staff for workforce and communications for the Labor Department’s Good Jobs Initiative, wrote in his newsletter last month. Accordingly, offloading certain Job Corps properties “could raise a substantial amount of money” for the program, he said.
Congress is in a position to use its leverage to keep Job Corps centers open. Given the bipartisan outcry that followed the Labor Department’s announcement, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have the necessary political muscle to maintain or increase funding for the Job Corps, pass legislation to strengthen it, and root out financial mismanagement or operational issues by ensuring adequate oversight of the program.
Unlike the Biden administration’s pause on selected Job Corps center operations to keep the program running, the recent move by Trump’s Labor Department “pretty nakedly has less to do with helping young people and more about checking a lingering to-do off a list in a Heritage Foundation conference room,” Beadle wrote.
Secretary Chavez-DeRemer has affirmed the Labor Department's commitment to “ensuring all participants are supported through this transition and connected with the resources they need to succeed,” but as the agency gears up to “evaluate the program’s possibilities” and a key deadline to extend the temporary ban on the centers up today, students and staff have taken it upon themselves to restore the Job Corps.
Their message to the Labor Department? Says one plaintiff: “Don’t throw the good out with the bad.”
