Governors Want To Take Over Federal Job-Training Programs Replace Labyrinthine Bureaucracy With Simple Block Grants, They Say

Now that the federal government has ceded control of welfare to the states, the nation’s governors are clamoring to take over its $20 billion employment and training system as well.

In interviews at the National Governors Association winter meeting, governors from both parties ridiculed the federal “work force development” system as an indefensible breeding ground for waste and inefficiency.

The governors vowed Sunday to lobby Congress to abolish the convoluted array of more than 100 federal jobs programs spanning seven Cabinet agencies and replace it with simple block grants that states would be able to decide how to spend.

Governor Tom Ridge, a Republican from Pennsylvania, said he would press President Clinton on the matter during a White House meeting with governors today.

The welfare bill Clinton signed last August has been hailed as a milestone in American federalism, allowing states to craft their own programs and rules instead of simply administering a federal entitlement. Governors are now eyeing work force development - which includes adult education, vocational rehabilitation, school-to-work, and job placement and training programs - as the next frontier in a historic shift of federal power to the states.

“It’s the obvious next step,” said Governor Don Sundquist, Republican of Tennessee. “We’ve got this crazy mishmash of bureaucracy, all these different rules telling us what to do. Just give us the money and let us do it our way.”

At a time of growing concern about the effect of a high-tech economy on a low-skilled work-force, the fragmented services for job seekers are sure to come under the microscope this year. Welfare overhaul has made the subject even more timely, since adult education and training are often crucial to moving welfare recipients into decent jobs.

Like the welfare system, the work force development system sprang up during the Depression in the 1930s, expanded during the War on Poverty in the 1960s, and developed a legion of critics who called it a failed system during the early 1990s.

It is not clear that governors will get control of funding for jobs programs despite basic support from Congress members across the ideological spectrum, ranging from Senator Edward M. Kennedy to House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Last year, a block grant bill for the jobs programs died in conference committee, even though the House and Senate overwhelmingly passed separate versions. Now the bill’s strongest advocate, Nancy Kassenbaum, a Kansas Republican, has retired from the Senate and her replacement on the Labor and Human Resources committee, Senator James Jeffords, Republican of Vermont, is cooler to the concept.

One problem is that the programs - anywhere from 100 to 170 - have developed their own constituencies. Unions are blocking the abolition of programs that serve dislocated workers. Organizations of disabled persons want to protect vocational rehabilitation, and youth advocates are fighting to keep Job Corps and school-to-work programs.

But the governors may have to settle for a block grant for jobs program that is less ambitious than the all-inclusive measure they are seeking. “It should be a no-brainer, but we don’t see the support on the Hill,” said an aide to New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman. “I think we lost the momentum.”

Almost every state has restructured its own work-force development system in recent years. Massachusetts, for instance, is one of 33 states to experiment with “one-stop career centers,” which give job seekers a single entry point to the confusing network of programs.

States are also developing performance standards, streamlining their bureaucracies, and upgrading their technology. But with funds still coming from so many different sources, for so many different purposes, the governors say their systems are still woefully inefficient.

Block grants, they say, will solve those problems. But advocates for the various programs warn that Congress would use the block grant system as an excuse to cut funding for job training programs, just as it did with welfare.