The Trump administration wants Congress to slash the budget of the U.S. Department of Labor and lots of other federal departments, while boosting budgets big-time for the military and Department of Homeland Security. Those spending proposals are summarized in a May 2 letter to the U.S. House Appropriations Committee as it prepares the discretionary budget for Fiscal Year 2026, starting Oct. 1, 2025.
The president’s budget request includes a $4.6 billion cut in the Labor Department budget, reducing it from $13.3 billion down to $8.6 billion, 34.9%. The cuts include $1.6 billion from eliminating Job Corps, $405 million from eliminating a job training and subsidized employment program for low-income seniors, $1.6 billion from unspecified Labor Department grant programs, and another $1 billion in unspecified cuts.
The president’s budget request also includes full-scale elimination of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS). Established in 1947, FMCS prevented strikes by providing mediators to unions and employers — until March, when about 95% of its staff was summarily terminated without cause by the Trump administration.
Other programs proposed for total elimination include the National Endowment for Democracy and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. Major cuts are proposed to foreign aid, the federal work-study program, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the Transportation Security Administration, the FBI, the Section 8 program of rental assistance vouchers, and the United Nations and its peacekeeping missions.
Offsetting savings from the cuts proposed, the Trump administration wants to increase the military budget by 13%, to $1.01 trillion. And it wants to increase the Homeland Security budget by $43.8 billion in order to “fully implement the President’s mass removal campaign” and finish construction of the border wall on the Mexican border, among other things.
The president’s budget request is a starting point for the budget discussion. Under the Constitution, Congress determines the budget.
Job Corps: You’re fired?
Job Corps is a “failed experiment,” says an explanatory note in the Trump administration’s May 2 budget request to Congress, adding that the program has been “plagued by a culture of violence, assault, sex crimes, drug infractions, and death,” and has “an exorbitant per-graduate cost.”
The proposed elimination of Job Corps was hinted at the week before with a “Job Corps Transparency Report” released by the U.S. Department of Labor on April 25, which painted the federal program in unflattering terms.
Begun 1964 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, Job Corps is a residential career training program for low-income young people ages 16 to 24. Participants get free room and board, health care, and a small stipend while they learn basic job skills to get ready for careers in construction, auto repair, manufacturing, and other trades. Some Job Corps centers, like the Timber Lake site in Estacada, refer graduates to union apprenticeship programs including one sponsored by Painters Local 10.
But the transparency report says Job Corps overall has an average cost per enrollee of just under $50,000 and a graduation rate of just 32%, and that participants earn $16,695 annually on average after leaving the program.
If Congress agrees to terminate Job Corps, it would lead to closure of five Job Corps training sites in Oregon: Timber Lake in Estacada, Wolf Creek in Glide, Springdale in Troutdale, Angell in Yachats, and Tongue Point in Astoria. The five centers had a total of 953 enrollees in 2023.
