Federal agencies

Trump administration proposes merging Labor, Education departments

June 25, 2018
3 Comments
Department of Labor Office of Management and Budget
Government reorg report
Source: Office of Management and Budget

Washington — The Trump administration is proposing a merger between the departments of Labor and Education as part of a wide-ranging government reorganization, although the current makeup of Congress makes the plan unlikely to come to fruition.

Cabinet changes require congressional approval, including 60 votes in the Senate. That means getting nine Democrat or independent senators on board to greenlight the proposed Department of Education and the Workforce. A previous attempt to merge the two departments in the mid-1990s proved unsuccessful.

In a video posted June 21, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said training current or future workers is a major focus of this most recent attempt.

“This is what a lot of countries do because they see both job training and educational training as preparing folks for the workforce,” Mulvaney said.

Under the proposal, OSHA and the Mine Safety and Health Administration would go under one umbrella – the Enforcement agency – along with the Wage and Hour Division, DOE’s Office for Civil Rights and others. NIOSH would move to the National Institutes of Health from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an idea previously floated during the current appropriations season.

The merger plan quickly drew responses from critics and supporters.

“The proposal to merge the Labor and Education departments is a dangerous and bad idea that should be stopped. The core functions of these two departments – serving children and protecting working people – are critical tasks that require the individual attention each receives,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a June 21 press release.

In contrast, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), chair of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, said in a June 21 press release that “the proposed Department of Education and the Workforce is recognition of the clear relationship between education policy at every level and the needs of the growing American workforce.”

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Chris Campbell
June 29, 2018
Yes! Absolutely! The federal government is full of agencies and bureaus in which the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. In private industry, we put the functions that need to work together under the same leadership, and it streamlines things considerably. The only argument for not doing this is likely to be from those with a vested interest in keeping things bloated or inefficient. The union official arguing that safety is important misses the point, in my opinion. In my experience, OSHA tends to put an adversarial component into the whole workplace safety issue. It is important to have safety standards, but that should be managed and overseen in a cooperative framework, not the current means that too often involves disgruntled employees wanting to punish their employers. If OSHA were to work with employers and employees as a go-between, with the authority to enforce goals that support leading indicators - active hazard assessment and correction programs, rather than the 'to the letter' standards currently in place that miss wide stretches of issues, and which due to the onerous process of regulatory update are twenty years behind the current best practices, employers would be more apt to react via managing safety instead of getting legal help to find the loopholes. The union official in the article would do well to recognize that education and workforce are strongly linked: almost every student eventually graduates and goes to work, so a national eduation policy or focus that recognizes the ultimate goal of education is to prepare young people to become adults that work and otherwise function in our society. It is the same thinking that would either separate the Departments of Defense and Veterans' Affairs. Why have a Cabinet Department that focuses on only one portion of a person's life or career, then turn over that focus to another? Something is lost in the turnover.
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Mike S.
June 29, 2018
Merging the departments make sense. Richard Trumpka's statement shows a clear need for the merger. He states "The core function of these two departments -serving children and protecting working people..." Work requirements are changing with technology. Education can no longer be looked at through the lens of "serving children". Our workforce needs to be educated in order to adapt to using new methods. Education needs to be addressed as a life-long endeavor and should be used as a tool for "protecting working people". Politics will most likely never let the two departments merge but both departments need to address issues. The Department of Education needs to place more emphasis on giving students the opportunity to pursue careers that do not require college. We have way too many people in debt with college degrees that are working unrelated jobs in fields that have nothing to do with their degree. The Department of Labor needs to place more emphasis on preparing the labor force for changes that are surely coming. Artificial intelligence and automation will eliminate for under-educated employees creating the need for re-education. We need an educated workforce that is educated for the jobs they do. This may be easier to accomplish with the unification of the two departments.
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July 5, 2018
If you think about the purpose of education being to prepare student to enter the workforce, it makes sense to join the two departments. Right now, there's a disconnect, and students aren't learning the things they need to know to be successful in the workplace. There's a mismatch between the skills employers need, and the skills being taught in schools, or the skills students think they need. If there was better communication between industry and education, those gaps could be filled.
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