Sponsors (2)
The bill aims to expand and coordinate workforce training and evidence-based local responses to substance-use-related labor and treatment gaps—potentially improving employment and care capacity—while relying on limited/new funding certainty and risking uneven access, added costs, and administrative burdens.
Unemployed and dislocated workers in high-need areas gain access to new training and job pathways in substance-use prevention, treatment, and related behavioral health roles, increasing employment opportunities.
Healthcare and behavioral health workers receive expanded training funding, increasing local capacity to deliver addiction, mental health, and pain management care.
States and local governments receive regularly updated, evidence-based guidance on workforce responses to high local rates of substance use disorder, improving program design and helping them apply for federal implementation funding.
State and local governments (and ultimately taxpayers) may need to bear implementation costs because the bill provides guidance and grant eligibility but does not itself create guaranteed new funding.
Taxpayers could face increased federal spending to stand up new grant programs supporting substance-use workforce activities without identified offsets.
Funding targeted to substance-use workforce activities could reduce available WIOA national grant funds for other dislocated worker priorities, shifting resources away from other needs.
Based on analysis of 3 sections of legislative text.
Requires annual dissemination of evidence-based workforce practices for responding to substance use disorder impacts and allows national dislocated worker grants to fund prevention/treatment workforce activities and eligible recipients.
Official title: To amend the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act to provide to States and local areas information on the best practices for addressing the effects that substance use disorder has on the workforce, and to provide local areas with grants to provide training activities related to the treatment and prevention of substance use disorder.
Introduced April 6, 2026 by Ryan Mackenzie · Last progress April 6, 2026
Requires the Labor Department to collect and share, each year, evidence-based and promising practices that help states and local areas respond to workforce harms caused by high rates of substance use disorders. It also expands the national dislocated worker grant program so the Secretary can fund employment and training activities tied to prevention and treatment of substance use disorders and specifies who may get that grant-funded assistance, including dislocated workers, long-term unemployed people, those unemployed or underemployed because of widespread substance use, and health care workers or jobseekers in prevention/treatment roles. The bill mainly adds targeted technical assistance and a new allowable grant purpose under existing workforce law to support building and replenishing local prevention-and-treatment workforces in areas where demand exceeds local resources.