EXCLUSIVE: Trump Admin Teams Up With Two States To ‘Make America Skilled Again’

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) is set to announce Tuesday that it is partnering with Colorado and Alabama to expand registered apprenticeships.

Alabama and Colorado both secured $12.5 million in funding from the DOL, which will allow the two states to “develop resources and invest in educational pipelines” that create more registered apprenticeship opportunities, according to a news release first obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The DOL’s two new cooperative agreements seek to help make new apprenticeship program registration more efficient and make skills training opportunities more accessible to youth.

“The continued growth of our nation’s Registered Apprenticeship system depends on strong federal and state partnerships,” Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer told the DCNF in a statement. “To Make America Skilled Again, we are following President Trump’s direction to provide more resources at the local level so we can reach our goal of one million new apprenticeships nationwide.” (RELATED: Two Trump Cabinet Officials Join Forces To ‘Make Manufacturing Great Again’)

“Our exciting new partnerships with Alabama and Colorado will help build stronger pathways for our young people to enter Registered Apprenticeships and streamline the creation of new Registered Apprenticeships to meet businesses’ unique needs,” Chavez-DeRemer continued.

The DOL’s cooperative agreement with Alabama partly includes the Alabama Commission on Higher Education supporting the expansion of registered apprenticeships as a workforce training solution by making it easier to register new programs and lowering start-up costs. Meanwhile, the federal agency’s cooperative agreement with Colorado will partly include Colorado’s Department of Labor and Employment developing new tools and resources aiming to bolster the expansion of pre-apprenticeships that lead to more registered apprenticeships.

The Trump administration has been moving to expand registered apprenticeships in the U.S. this year in the hopes to meet President Donald Trump’s stated goal of having at least 1 million active new apprentices. Since Trump took office, more than 134,000 new apprentices have registered across the U.S., according to a June 30 DOL news release.

In April, the president signed an executive order, “Preparing Americans For High-Paying Skilled Trade Jobs Of The Future,” which states that his administration will “further protect and strengthen” registered apprenticeships and “build on their successes to seize new opportunities and unlock the limitless potential of the American worker.”

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