Job Corps
Program Name
$ Change from 2025 Enacted (in millions)
-1,584
Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP)
-405
Brief Description of Program and Recommended Reduction or Increase
The Budget eliminates Job Corps, which has been a failed experiment to help America’s youth—and, in some cases, has harmed them. The program has been plagued by a culture of violence, assault, sex crimes, drug infractions, and death. A 2017 GAO report found there were nearly 50,000 reported safety violations and 265 deaths in just 10 years of the program. Not only is Job Corps financially unsustainable, with an exorbitant per-graduate cost (some centers spend more than $400,000 per graduate), it fails to give young people the start they need in their careers. In fact, an audit of Job Corps from DOL’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) found program graduates made less than the poverty threshold. This program has often made participants worse off, which is severely misaligned with the President’s priority to improve job opportunities and economic growth for all Americans. SCSEP purports to provide job training and subsidized employment to low-income seniors, but fails at its goal: to move seniors to unsubsidized, gainful employment. In reality, it is effectively an earmark to leftist, DEI-promoting entities like the National Urban League, the Center for Workforce Inclusion, and Easter Seals. It also is duplicative of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Employment and Training and DOL’s Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act funding, including the new MASA grant program. Seniors would be better served by programs operated by State and local governments, with proven track records of increasing wages.
Department of the Interior (DOI) Cuts, Reductions, and Consolidations
Bureau of Reclamation and the Central Utah Project
-609
Operation of the National Park System
-900
The Budget provides $1.2 billion for the Bureau of Reclamation and the Central Utah Project. The Budget reduces funding for programs that have nothing to do with building and maintaining water infrastructure, such as habitat restoration. Instead, the Budget focuses Reclamation and the Central Utah Project on their core missions of maintaining assets that provide safe, reliable, and efficient management of water resources throughout the western United States.
The National Park Service (NPS) responsibilities include a large number of sites that are not “National Parks,” in the traditionally understood sense, many of which receive small numbers of mostly local visitors, and are better categorized and managed as State-level parks. The Budget would continue supporting many national treasures, but there is an urgent need to streamline staffing and transfer certain properties to State-level management to ensure the long-term health and sustainment of the National Park system.
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