Washington — A federal program that helps finance job-training programs, including some at colleges, is coming under renewed scrutiny for lack of accountability, according to today’s Washington Post.
The High Growth Job Training Initiative has issued more than $270-million in grants since 2000, and supports several programs in higher education. A yet-to-be-released report by the Labor Department’s inspector general audited 10 recent grants, and found that a majority failed to meet objectives or evaluate their grant outcomes. Two such grantees in the audit were community colleges.
The criticism in the report appears more aimed at poor oversight and lax accountability measures from the Labor Department than at the recipients themselves. A similar investigation in 2007 found that 87 percent of the job-training grants had been awarded without competition.
Both audits were requested by Sen. Tom Harkin, a Democrat of Iowa who is chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the Labor Department. “This report reveals a double insult for American taxpayers — not only did the Bush administration’s Labor Department handpick the organizations to receive DOL grants, but many of those organizations failed to deliver measurable results,” Senator Harkin told the Post. —JJ Hermes