EDITORIAL: Federal government wastes billions on ineffective job training programs

How hard is it to kill a government program? Well, even something as useless as the federal Tea Tasting Board managed to survive for a century until finally succumbing in 1996.

“We do not have a Coffee Board or a Candy Board,” said Nevada’s own Harry Reid, who led the effort in the Senate to pull the plug on the regulatory panel, which cost taxpayers about $250,000 a year. “We do not need a Tea Board.”

Remember, this was a tea tasting board. More substantive federal programs tend to be anchored in the Beltway like the towers of a massive suspension bridge secured far below the depths.

Consider Washington’s vast array of “job training” programs. The U.S. government spends more than $6 billion a year on 47 different such endeavors that are spread throughout nine federal agencies. Problem is, there’s no evidence they actually work.

A U.S. Labor Department report compiled during the Obama administration concluded “the programs are largely ineffective at raising participants’ earnings and are offering services that don’t meet the needs of job seekers or employers,” The Hill reported last year.

The New York Times recently came to the same conclusion regarding one of the biggest federal job training efforts, Job Corps, which costs taxpayers $1.7 billion annually. The program, which dates to LBJ’s Great Society, is intended to help high school dropouts — principally black and Hispanic — learn a trade. But despite costing up to $45,000 per student, the Times noted this week, the Labor Department’s inspector general found that “Job Corps could not demonstrate beneficial job training outcomes.”

Yet craven pols on both sides of the aisle are petrified of opposing a program intended to secure a slice of the American Dream for underprivileged minority kids. When Donald Trump proposed eliminating Job Corps last year, supporters went into attack mode. Job Corps survived.

The Times reports that Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta remains intent on imposing reforms and even closing failed Job Corps centers. But she has her work cut out for her, because Job Corps centers are, not surprisingly, scattered throughout congressional districts across the country to ensure continued support and funding.

“You have a program with a rich and complicated history that’s one of the biggest leftovers from the war on poverty,” Eric M. Seleznow, who served in the Labor Department under President Barack Obama, told The Times, “and it is enormously complicated to make any significant changes.”

Good intentions aside, it’s virtually criminal that members of Congress are so cavalierly willing to set billions in taxpayer dollars afire each year in order to perpetuate programs that even government auditors admit are wasteful and ineffective.

Federal job training programs may have occasional successes, but there’s no evidence they accomplish anything as a whole that the private market can’t achieve. It’s time many of them went the way of the government tea tasters.