Apprenticeships are a high priority for Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, but his department has struggled through two years and multiple false starts to propose a regulation that can implement the program. | Al Drago/Getty Images Employment & Immigration Trump’s latest version of The Apprentice falls short

Two years after President Donald Trump signed an executive order that he said would “create apprenticeships for millions of our citizens,” not a single apprenticeship program has been created under the program, nor a single person trained.

Apprenticeships rank so high as a priority for Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta that when he appears in public he speaks of little else. But his department has struggled through two years and multiple false starts to propose a regulation that can implement the program.


The delay shows how, in attempting to speed deregulation by cutting out bureaucrats and confining policy discussion to political appointees, the Trump administration is slowing down its own initiatives.

The White House budget office finally cleared a proposed rule Friday, signaling it will likely be made public soon. In a written statement, a DOL spokeswoman said that “much progress has been made, and in the coming days we will announce important milestones.”

But with a 90-day comment period to follow the proposed regulation's publication in the Federal Register, and then the usual adjustments in response to those comments at the Labor Department and the White House Office of Management and Budget, Trump‘s first term may be nearing its end before a final rule allows the president's apprenticeship plan to bear fruit.

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The White House has expressed frustration with DOL's slow progress, which many inside the agency attribute to interference from a small circle within Acosta’s senior staff and the agency's repeated battles with the White House. A tug-of-war between Trump political appointees and the civil servants who possess expertise on the rule's technical aspects has damaged the latter group's morale, with some blaming the administration’s paranoid distrust of the “deep state.”

“It’s brutal, man,” said Daniel Villao, former deputy administrator of DOL’s apprenticeship office under Trump and President Barack Obama. “It’s not that they’re not smart people, and not that they don’t know what they want. It’s that they don’t trust the machinery to give it to them.”

The chief difficulty in crafting the proposed rule is that Trump's June 2017 executive order called for "easing the regulatory burden" on apprenticeship programs. Doing so without also losing accountability for how the federal dollars that fund these programs are spent has proved no easy task.

The new “industry-recognized” apprenticeship programs would be designed and operated by private business groups with expertise in their fields. By creating a system outside the Labor Department’s registered apprenticeship program — which historically has emphasized construction and other union jobs — the administration would, the thinking went, be able to cut red tape and encourage businesses to take the lead.

“One of the challenges that we’ve been picking through very methodically to try to draft this rule," a senior White House official told POLITICO, "is understanding how to get the balance right — how to ensure sufficient protections of quality for participating students and participating apprentices, and how to actually provide the smaller employers in particular the flexibility they need."

The idea was criticized from the start by Democrats, who said it lacked a proper mechanism for quality control. Under the proposed system, they said, the government would never be able to verify the effectiveness of the programs it was funding. Some Republicans, meanwhile, privately complained that the model didn’t offer sufficient incentive for businesses to participate.

After Trump’s executive order, Acosta assembled an apprenticeship task force whose membership included two Fortune 500 CEOs, two Republican state governors, and the actor who played Cliff the mailman on "Cheers." After five meetings, the group submitted a 51-page report to Trump in May 2018 outlining its recommendations.

There followed a year of radio silence. In February, DOL leaders abruptly canceled a planned Presidents’ Day announcement of $150 million in funding for the industry-recognized program, causing some inside the building to question whether the rule would ever see the light of day.

Inside the Labor Department, much blame for the delays is assigned to Acosta’s former chief of staff, Nick Geale. Geale was especially distrustful of career experts at DOL, according to four current and former DOL officials, believing them to be hostile to the policies of the Trump administration and the source of many leaks. Under his leadership, career staff were given as little as an hour to read drafts that exceeded 100 pages, and were prohibited from making changes to rule-making documents.

One staffer recalled receiving a draft of the apprentice rule riddled with errors, and with an entire section repeated. When staff pointed out the errors, this person was told the draft could not be changed. On a separate occasion, staffers were told to write a preamble for the rule within a week, but senior officials refused to explain what some of the required terms and provisions meant.

Tensions ran so high that OMB eventually stepped in to review Geale's scorched-earth management style. The White House last month ordered Acosta to fire Geale after concluding that Geale wasn’t moving moving fast enough to implement the administration’s deregulatory agenda — including the apprenticeship rule — and that his combative style was eroding employee morale.

DOL's delay in producing the apprenticeship proposal also irked Ivanka Trump, who frequently advocates skills training on behalf of the administration, according to two former DOL officials with knowledge of the situation.

“She’s fed up with Acosta,” said one of the former officials.

Separately, Ivanka Trump in February set up a new workforce advisory board with Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross that included the CEOs of Apple, Walmart and Lockheed Martin. On Tuesday, the pair visited a Siemens facility and a local nonprofit in Charlotte, N.C.

The president delivers remarks during a meeting with the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board, led by Ivanka Trump and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, inside the White House on March 6. | Tom Brenner/Getty Images

Even as White House aides express frustration with Acosta, the president himself is pleased with his labor secretary, according to a former GOP Capitol Hill aide familiar with the situation. More than most presidents, Trump judges success or failure by simple metrics — the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the number of southern border arrests in a given month, for example. With the Labor Department reporting consistently low unemployment and robust job growth in most months, Trump may simply associate Acosta with success. Acosta, in turn, rarely misses an opportunity to praise the strength of Trump’s economy. The president's affection for Acosta was Acosta’s “saving grace when he was more under the gun,” a former White House official told POLITICO.

The press-shy Acosta caught some bad publicity in November when the Miami Herald published an expose about a lenient 2008 plea deal that Acosta, then U.S. attorney for Florida's southern district, struck with billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. More unfavorable reports followed in February when a federal judge ruled that Acosta's failure to notify Epstein's victims before finalizing the plea deal violated the 2004 Crime Victims Rights Act, prompting a Department of Justice investigation and some congressional demands for his resignation.

Then came Geale's firing, which was interpreted as a shot across the bow for Acosta. In a move first reported by Bloomberg Law, acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney tightened his oversight of DOL’s rulemaking process, detailing three White House aides to sit in on all the agency's regulatory meetings.

The atmosphere grew more relaxed after Geale’s departure, a DOL staffer said, but other Trump-appointed officials remain suspicious of those outside Acosta’s inner circle. Staff still complain that their advice is ignored.

“You crank out a massive quantity of work, and then no decision is made,” said Villao, who left in May after being reassigned to a different department in December. “And that, in my mind, is just a failure in owning decisions.”

Anita Kumar contributed to this report.

