by James A. Bacon
Governor Glenn Youngkin wants to consolidate the plethora of Virginia’s workforce development programs spread across 13 agencies and six secretariats, according to Virginia Public Media. Not only do these programs consume $485 million in federal and state funding but there are a bewildering 1,500 of them.
I find that number so astonishing as to be unbelievable. The Richmond Times-Dispatch counts programs over 12 state agencies. Whatever the actual number — and the inability to pin it down precisely is indicative of how dysfunctional the system is — workforce development in Virginia is highly fractured.
The system is fragmented in part because many programs are funded as the result of state and federal legislation with narrow goals that target narrow groups or because they dole out funds to satisfy diverse geographic constituencies. Many programs run on autopilot. No one measures outcomes. No one measures effectiveness. No one re-evaluates them.
Redrawing organization charts and appointing a new boss to oversee the bureaucratic labyrinth won’t accomplish much. But Youngkin has more in mind.
“A bloated, disparate construct that has workforce programs spread all over the place, and none of what you’re measured for effectiveness, is the antithesis to what I believe government should be doing,” he said. “We can be efficient and we can be effective. I think it should run much more like a business, and that’s what we’re gonna go do.”
“I don’t begin for a minute to think that we have a magic wand here, but I have run lots of large organizations. And in this case, I know that when you have disparate operations that all are underscaled or are working independently, they can work better together,” Youngkin said. “We can do this a lot better.”
VPM notes that the proposed Virginia Department of Workforce Development & Advancement would have a specific agency, Workforce Analytics, to manage data systems and portals currently under the Department of Education, the Virginia Community College System, and the Virginia Office of Education Economics. It’s not clear from the VPM article what Workforce Analytics would do, but the name suggests that the Youngkin administration intends to apply a data-driven approach to managing the disparate programs, perhaps akin to the way the Department of Education has taken a data-driven approach to evaluating public school performance.
Reforming workforce development programs is not likely to be as contentious as K-12 policy because it focuses exclusively on preparing people for jobs. There is no movement to use workforce training as a means to transform culture and society, nor is there a politically contentious backlash. Accordingly, there is a reasonable chance that Youngkin will find state Senate Democrats to be cooperative.
“I firmly believe that this is not bipartisan but a nonpartisan topic,” Youngkin said. “We’ve seen support for these moves, both from Republicans and Democrats, and delegates and senators.”
“I would think that for anybody … concerned about the future for the commonwealth would love us to be back [as the] number 1 state for doing business, focusing on having a strong workforce. And that’s not going to happen without working with labor,” said Delegate Eileen Filler-Corn, D-Fairfax.
Still, whoever heads the new department will have his or her hands full. The community college system, which is the main provider of workforce development programs, will remain within the Department of Education. Close cooperation between state agencies will be required to avoid redundancy. Furthermore, many programs are federally funded and have federally defined missions. The state has no authority to reallocate resources from ineffective federal programs, and federal law may limit the state’s ability to hold them accountable.
Virginia governors have been wrestling with the fragmented workforce development system going back to the time of Governor Mark Warner. Nothing much has changed. Maybe this time will be different.
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