Job Corpse

A few days ago, I joined Joel Heitkamp on his KFGO Radio show to talk about the closing of the Quentin N. Burdick Job Corps Center in Minot, North Dakota. I once worked as a career counselor at the Center. I also ran for North Dakota’s at-large U.S. House seat last year, and part of what Joel wanted to talk about was the tepid response to the closure from North Dakota’s federal delegation.

Once upon a time, shutting down a federally funded operation in any U.S. city on short notice would have set that city’s senators and representative in Congress on fire. They would have publicly rebuked the administration—even an administration of their own party—and demanded testimony from the appropriate department. They would have held up legislation or withheld their votes for administration priorities until they had some answers. Their anger on the chamber floor would have been immortalized on C-SPAN.

Not any more; at least not with Republicans while Trump is in office. Joel read Senator Kevin Cramer’s text-message statement first:

“While I’m a big fan of Job Corps centers, the average cost per student each year is over $80,000 while only graduating 38%. We can’t ignore the broader fiscal reality and the need to set priorities. We have a $37 trillion debt and it’s headed for $50 trillion.”¹

When Joel asked me what I thought about Cramer’s statement, I said that Senator Cramer was rationalizing, not representing. Instead of taking care of constituents, he was coming up with reasons to say yes to the Trump administration at his constituents’ expense. His statement misled with apples-to-oranges comparisons and by what it left out.

By itself, a 38% graduation rate² sounds dismal, but Job Corps serves economically disadvantaged young people who often come from unstable housing situations, interrupted schooling, trauma, addiction, and generational poverty. Many arrive several grade levels behind their peers. Some leave because their families want them to come home to support the family. Others are separated for failure to progress through the program or for misconduct that would not have gotten them kicked out of high school. Considering the challenges faced by the Job Corps student population and the number of ways students can separate from the program, it’s a triumph that nearly 4 out of 10 complete it.

Senator Cramer’s concern about the cost per student leaves out that Job Corps students live in dorms and eat at a dining facility on campus. They get their driver’s licenses, complete high school, and get qualified in a trade. They get help with job placement and finding a place to live, and Job Corps follows up with students and their employers over time. If that $80,000 price tag still seems steep, we can contrast it with another place that commonly houses a disproportionate number of people from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds: prison.

The Burdick Job Corps Center served an outsized number of Native American students relative to their share of the population. As it turns out, Native Americans in North Dakota are also incarcerated at more than seven times the rate of white North Dakotans. The state’s overall incarceration rate stands at 560 people per 100,000 residents—one of the highest in the industrialized world, though below the U.S. average. Among NATO’s founding nations, only the U.S. exceeds 150 prisoners per 100,000 residents. Norway and Iceland’s incarceration rates are less than 10% of North Dakota’s.

The cost of incarcerating an adult in North Dakota is around $43,000 per year, and the cost of incarcerating a juvenile is $198,500 per year.³ Long term, $80,000 to get a struggling young person on their feet, off of Medicaid, and into the tax-paying workforce looks like a bargain. It is one of the few things that might actually pay for itself.

Senator Cramer also did some hand wringing over the federal debt, and Representative Fedorchak, who listed the debt first among her reasons for getting into the 2024 race, also invoked efficient use of taxpayer dollars:

“Job Corps helps young adults build a pathway to a better life through education, training, and community support. That’s a valuable mission, especially at a time when businesses are eager to hire skilled workers. I hope this pause is temporary and results in meaningful reforms that strengthen the program’s impact across the country and use taxpayer dollars efficiently.”

Fedorchak’s statement says that she will do nothing, but she does ‘hope’ the pause is temporary. Will she just hope to be reelected? No, she will take action—and big campaign donations.

Senator Hoeven is from Minot and has an elementary school there named after him, but his office was equally mild in their response:

Senator Hoeven continues to support Job Corps and is working through his role on the Senate Appropriations Committee to ensure the program continues to operate. At the same time, while the Burdick Job Corps faculty do a great job of training young people to enter the workforce and placing them in their new careers, we are open to reforms in the program to ensure it is more effective on a national basis.”

Hoeven and Fedorchak both mentioned reforms, but what has happened at the Burdick Job Corps Center isn’t the result of or a precursor to reform. It is just more careless butchering. DOGE will add the price of any cancelled contracts to it’s running tally, and then fail to subtract the cost any replacement contract from their “savings.”

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer claims the decision to close some Job Corps centers was based on “in-depth fiscal analysis” and that the department is “committed to ensuring all participants are supported through this transition.” She also cited a “startling number of serious incident reports” from Job Corps Centers.

First, the in-depth fiscal analysis, called the Job Corps Transparency Report, was created by a DOGE staffer and is purposely misleading. Among other things, it uses pandemic-era numbers that inflate the per-student cost and decrease the graduation rate. That report was where Kevin Cramer got his numbers.

Second, many of these students will “transition” back to communities they were trying to escape.

And third, I used to put those incident reports into the system. Among the things that rated a report were using profanity, disrespect toward a teacher, skipping class, being late to class, and smoking in an unauthorized area. There was zero tolerance for alcohol, drugs, or drug paraphernalia on campus. Fighting would also result in separation.

The Trump administration and Congressional Republicans are entirely too comfortable with fictional reasons (HHS report with fake sources) to do what they want. They’ll end a program for disadvantaged Americans in the name of lowering the deficit while they champion a budget that will significantly increase the deficit.

In 2017, when the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) put out their estimates of how much the Tax Cut and Jobs Act would balloon the deficit, Mitch McConnell and other Republicans said the Committee wasn’t aggressive enough in their use of “dynamic scoring.” McConnell said, “I’m totally confident this is a revenue-neutral bill.” He knew it was not a revenue-neutral bill. The JCT’s high-end estimate of the deficit increase by the year 2019 was $224.5 billion. The actual increase was $400 billion.

And now House Speaker Mike Johnson says that those predicting a spike in the debt and deficit from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act are failing to consider dynamic scoring. As the debate over this bill goes on, we’d all do well to remember that dynamic scoring is BS. Or, if you prefer, DS is BS. It’s as imaginary as Santa bringing the Easter Bunny to your house on Halloween to put a pot of gold under your pillow. It’s sort of like the Job Corps Transparency Report.

One lie to take from the poor, another to give to the rich, and so we see a decades-old program shuttered without ceremony, sacrificed on the altar of “efficiency” by politicians who can’t be bothered to hold an in-person town hall.

The tragedy isn’t just the closing of Burdick Job Corps Center. It’s the story it tells: If you’re rich, we’ll rewrite the tax code to suit you. If you’re poor, we’ll accuse you of not trying hard enough.

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And if you do try—if you enroll, show up, and put in the work—we’ll still find a way to move the goalposts, lock the doors, and call it reform.