Rebuild America's Skilled Workforce

The Problem

For decades, federal education policy has treated the four-year college degree as the default pathway to economic success and skilled trades as the fallback for those who could not make it.  The result is a workforce crisis that is now measurable in dollars, in delays, and in infrastructure we cannot build or maintain.

The construction industry alone needs 349,000 net new workers in 2026 and 456,000 in 2027 [1].  The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 649,300 annual openings across all construction and extraction occupations through 2035, driven by retirements, career changes, and new positions created by growth [2].  JLL’s 2026 skilled trades talent research estimates that by 2030, 2.1 million skilled trades positions across the built environment could go unfilled, with potential economic losses reaching $1 trillion annually [3].  These are not decade-long projections.  They describe what is happening now.

The demographic math is unforgiving.  The National Association of Home Builders found that 41% of the construction workforce will reach retirement age by 2031 [4].  For every five skilled tradespeople who retire, only about two new workers enter the field to replace them [5].  In the housing sector, this shortage carries an aggregate economic impact of $10.8 billion per year: roughly 19,000 homes that are not built, and construction timelines averaging nearly two months longer than they would be with adequate labor [4].

The pipeline that should be filling this gap is leaking.  The number of active registered apprentices has grown significantly, from approximately 318,000 in fiscal year 2014 to roughly 680,000 in fiscal year 2024, an increase of 114% [6].  That growth is real and it matters.  But the apprenticeship system cancels an estimated 150,000 to 160,000 enrollees per year, against approximately 120,000 completions [7].  The Department of Labor reported in 2021 that overall registered apprenticeship completion rates were below 35% [8].  We are recruiting people into a system that loses the majority of them before they finish.

Meanwhile, the federal government has spent the last two decades cutting the one program specifically designed to prepare students for these careers.  The Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act is the primary federal law supporting career and technical education in American high schools and community colleges.  Adjusted for inflation, total Perkins funding declined 24% between fiscal year 2007 and fiscal year 2014, with individual state allocations declining by as much as 30% [9].  Current annual Perkins funding stands at approximately $1.4 billion [10]; for context, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act together committed over $1.2 trillion in infrastructure and manufacturing investment [11], but none of those laws included dedicated funding for the career and technical education programs that train the workers to execute that investment [12].  We passed the largest infrastructure spending package in American history without a plan to build the workforce to deliver it.

The irony is that the careers we have been steering young people away from pay well.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports 2025 median annual wages of $63,190 for electricians, $63,800 for plumbers and pipefitters, and $61,010 for HVAC technicians [13], [14], [15].  Elevator and escalator installers earn a median of $106,580 [16].  Licensed tradespeople with additional certifications or their own businesses routinely exceed $100,000 per year.  The average bachelor’s degree graduate, by comparison, leaves school with approximately $29,560 to $35,530 in student loan debt [17], [18], and a typical starting salary of roughly $67,000 [19].  We have been telling an entire generation to go into debt for a credential that, in many cases, pays less than the careers we told them to avoid.  The point is not that college is wrong; it is that a national workforce strategy built exclusively around one pathway is wrong.  The country needs engineers and it needs electricians.  It needs physicians and it needs the plumbers and HVAC technicians who keep hospitals functioning.  An integrated approach to workforce development starts by understanding what the nation actually needs, and then building the full range of pathways to meet those needs.

What We Propose

The skilled trades shortage was not caused by a single piece of legislation.  It was caused by decades of structural neglect: chronic underfunding of career and technical education, an apprenticeship system that loses the majority of its enrollees before completion, a cultural bias that treats trades careers as second-class, and a pattern of passing massive infrastructure spending bills without funding the workforce to execute them.  The solution must address all four.

1. Dramatically increase federal investment in career and technical education through Perkins Act reauthorization.  The Perkins Act is the primary federal law supporting CTE in American high schools and community colleges [9], [10].  Its current annual funding of approximately $1.4 billion represents a 24% inflation-adjusted decline from its 2007 level [9].  We will advocate for a reauthorization that at minimum restores CTE funding to its pre-decline purchasing power, expands access to CTE pathways beginning in middle school, and ties funding formulas to documented labor market demand in high-shortage trades.  Every dollar of federal infrastructure spending should carry a corresponding workforce development obligation.

2. Fix the apprenticeship completion crisis.  Growing apprenticeship enrollment is meaningless if the system continues to lose the majority of its participants before they finish.  With completion rates below 35% and cancellations exceeding completions by roughly 30,000 per year [7], [8], the registered apprenticeship system is functioning as a revolving door.  We will push for completion-rate transparency requirements for all federally registered programs, performance-based incentive funding that rewards programs with demonstrated completion and placement outcomes, and support services (transportation assistance, tool stipends, childcare access) that address the non-academic barriers driving early attrition.  The new Workforce Pell Grant program, which as of July 2026 extends federal Pell Grant eligibility to the classroom instruction component of registered apprenticeship programs [23], is a meaningful step; we should build on it.

3. Require workforce development plans as a condition of major federal infrastructure spending.  The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act together represent over $1.2 trillion in authorized spending on physical infrastructure, clean energy, and advanced manufacturing [11].  None included dedicated Perkins or CTE funding [12].  This is the policy equivalent of buying a factory and forgetting to hire workers.  Future infrastructure authorizations should include mandatory set-asides for workforce development, with funding flowing through existing CTE and apprenticeship channels rather than creating new bureaucratic structures.

4. Create meaningful tax incentives for employers who invest in workforce development.  Small and mid-size contractors, who perform the majority of residential and light commercial construction work in this country, cannot absorb the full cost of multi-year apprenticeship programs without support.  We will advocate for an expanded tax credit for employers who sponsor registered apprenticeships, with enhanced credits for programs that achieve above-median completion rates and for employers in documented high-shortage trades and regions.

5. Restore career and technical education pathways in American high schools.  A generation of students has passed through secondary education with no meaningful exposure to skilled trades as a career option.  We will advocate for federal incentive grants to school districts that establish or expand CTE programs aligned with regional labor market data, including funded partnerships with local trade unions, employer consortia, and community colleges that provide students with pre-apprenticeship experience before graduation.

6. Establish a standing National Workforce Needs Commission within the Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration.  The federal government currently has no permanent body that regularly assesses the nation’s workforce needs against its infrastructure, industrial, and defense commitments and translates that assessment into actionable training priorities.  The closest precedent, the National Skill Standards Board created by the National Skill Standards Act of 1994, was defunded and effectively dissolved in the early 2000s [20].  Local and state Workforce Development Boards exist under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act [21], but there is no national equivalent that aggregates their findings into a coherent picture.  We will advocate for a statutorily created commission, housed within ETA, that meets no less than quarterly and is composed of: labor union leaders at the national, state, and local levels; skilled trades representatives (journeymen, master tradespeople, apprenticeship program directors) at each level; and elected officials or their designated representatives from federal, state, and local government.  The commission’s mandate will be to produce an annual assessment of the nation’s workforce needs by trade and by region, identify gaps between committed federal spending and available workforce capacity, issue binding recommendations to the Secretary of Labor on training investment priorities, and foster innovation and entrepreneurship in the trades by identifying opportunities for new business formation, emerging specializations, and technology adoption that create pathways for skilled tradespeople to start and grow their own enterprises.  This is not a study group.  It is a permanent mechanism for ensuring that the people who build this country, the people who train them, and the people who set spending priorities are in the same room, looking at the same data, on a regular schedule.

A welder who builds bridges and an electrician who powers hospitals are professionals.  It is past time our education system, our tax code, and our federal workforce policy treated them that way.

How We’ll Know It’s Working