Sponsors (4)
Official title: To require the Secretary of Labor to establish a grant program for States to improve or establish a credential repository, and for other purposes.
Introduced April 15, 2026 by Lucy Mcbath · Last progress April 15, 2026
The bill increases transparency and interoperability of credential and outcome data to help individuals, educators, and employers make better decisions and improve workforce alignment, at the cost of new federal and state spending, administrative burdens, potential data-quality and reputational risks, and privacy/governance concerns.
Students, jobseekers, unemployed workers, low-income individuals, and young adults gain free, searchable, comparable data on credentials, programs, costs, outcomes, and career pathways, enabling better-informed education and career decisions.
Counselors, educators, employers, and training programs can use linked, interoperable data and tools to better align training and hiring with labor-market needs and to ease credit/credential transfer across states, improving workforce development and mobility.
State governments receive federal support—including grant funding and federal program dollars—to map credentials and build or improve data repositories, lowering some upfront infrastructure costs for statewide credential transparency efforts.
Taxpayers (federal and state) may bear higher costs and potential deficit impacts because grants, ongoing maintenance, and an open-ended authorization could increase spending without a specified cap.
State governments, training providers, and educational institutions must spend staff time and resources to collect, update, and report detailed program and outcome data, creating administrative burdens and likely local operational costs.
Students and jobseekers could get misleading signals about a credential's value if data quality, consistency, or risk adjustment is inadequate; similarly, providers risk reputational harm if metrics are misunderstood.
Based on analysis of 4 sections of legislative text.
Creates competitive grants to help states build public credential repositories with linked data on credentials, providers, quality, and outcomes.
Provides competitive federal grants to states to build, expand, or improve publicly accessible credential repositories that list every credential and training provider in the state and include program- and credential-level quality and outcome data. Grants (one per state, up to $10 million, three-year period) must support open, interoperable data, public input, data policies, guidance for counselors, and tools that help students, workers, employers, educators, and policymakers make informed education and career choices.