Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, Federal job training programs are seldom evaluated to determine whether they are meeting their intended purposes.

However, when the United States is $17.5 trillion in debt, we as representatives of the American taxpayers should do a better job to ensure that the programs we are funding are actually working and we are working with them.

We should pay particularly close attention to programs that receive billions of dollars every year from the Federal Government when their authorization lapsed over one decade ago.

The Murray-Isakson-Harkin-Alexander substitute amendment takes important steps to ensure title I State and local programs are more accurately evaluated, meaning performance measures and held accountable for unmet goals and resubmitted reports.

More specifically, the bill would sanction State and local programs should they continually fail to meet their performance measures or fail to submit required reports. The substitute amendment does not hold the Department of Labor to similar standards.

The Department is required to conduct evaluations and to submit separate reports to Congress. I was very pleased to work with Senators Alexander and Harkin to include in the managers' amendment a provision that would require the final evaluation reports to be made public and available to the public. In my opinion, requiring the Department to post these reports to the Department's Web site is a commonsense step toward improving transparency in the WIOA job training programs.

In addition, I worked closely with the HELP Committee chairman and ranking member to further discuss a procurement provision within the Job Corps section of the bill. While I believe there are still some outstanding concerns that we should continue to discuss, I believe everyone's goal is to ensure that the best Job Corps operators are able to compete for these sites.

Today I would like to offer an additional good governance measure that would subject the Department of Labor to similar sanctions as the States. It would help tackle the problem of the Department of Labor delaying congressionally mandated evaluations, which routinely has been abused by both Republican and Democratic administrations.

It is a shame that Congress passing a law requiring the completion of an evaluation by a certain date is not enough to get the job done. My amendment would remedy this problem by reducing the budget of the Department of Labor's Office of the Secretary by 5 percent in the year a report is due, should the agency fail to conduct and release the independent evaluation as required by this bill. This reduction of funds would continue each year until the report is finalized.

WIOA authorizes $9 billion each year for the next 5 years, and title I represents half of that funding. Therefore, ensuring an independent evaluation of title I programs is conducted and made publicly available for review and scrutiny by Congress and the American public. It is critically important for any future modification, renewal or elimination of programs.

I would appreciate the support of my colleagues for the passage of this amendment.

I yield the floor.

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Mr. LEE. If I could respond very briefly, I think it is important to point out that, yes, there may come a time when in any government office--whether it is an elected government office or appointed office--when someone who is new to the office might be affected by something that did or didn't happen during the predecessor's time in office.

But even were that to occur in the case of the Secretary of Labor, this is a position that could easily enable, could easily empower the new Secretary to come in and within a matter of months make sure our contractor gets a report done and make sure that report gets submitted.

It is also worth noting that when we entrust a Federal agency with the power to spend $9 billion of the American people's hard-earned taxpayer money, hard-earned resources, we should expect them to stand accountable, and they should certainly have the ability to have a study conducted and have that study released to the American people.

If we don't trust them to be able to issue that report and make it public, then we should have some reason to be concerned about giving them $9 billion.

But I think this is a reasonable requirement, and therefore I ask my colleagues to support this measure.

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