Sponsors (4)
The bill increases the effectiveness and accountability of workforce programs by prioritizing evidence-based and rigorously evaluated interventions, but in doing so risks reducing funding and competition for smaller or newer providers and for services whose benefits are harder or slower to measure.
Unemployed workers and jobseekers will receive more effective workforce services because states and local programs will prioritize funding for interventions with strong evidence of improving employment and training outcomes.
Program implementers and state agencies will have clear, tiered evidence standards (strong/moderate/promising) to design evaluations, leading to higher-quality, more comparable evidence over time and better program improvement.
Students and program innovators can access support for promising interventions that have high-quality research and ongoing evaluation, encouraging innovation while ensuring new approaches are assessed.
Local governments, community providers, and smaller programs may lose funding or be deprioritized because states could narrow funding to programs that meet the new evidence thresholds.
Small providers, nonprofits, and new program entrants will face higher evaluation costs to generate experimental or quasi-experimental evidence, which may limit competition and concentrate services among larger organizations.
Students and service recipients could see narrower programming because the federal definition may incentivize selecting programs that produce measurable short-term outcomes over broader services with harder-to-measure long-term benefits.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Defines 'evidence-based' with three evidence tiers and requires State workforce plans to describe strategies to prioritize funding evidence-based statewide workforce programs.
Adds a formal federal definition of “evidence-based” for workforce programs and requires State workforce plans to describe how the State will prioritize funding for evidence-based statewide workforce development activities. The definition sets three tiers of evidence (strong experimental, moderate quasi-experimental, or promising correlational with controls) and allows an alternative path based on a rationale plus ongoing evaluation. No new funding is specified.
Introduced March 11, 2025 by Erin Houchin · Last progress March 11, 2025