Hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee - Opening Statement of Sen. Murphy, Hearing on Nomination of Alexander Acosta as Secretary of Labor

Hearing

MURPHY: To follow up on Senator Badlwin's questioning regarding funding, I get a little worried when I hear you talk about accepting a lower level of funding for job training. You know, the President's budget has winners and losers, right? There's a lot more money for defense, there's money for a wall, and that comes at the expense of other programs.

I think we would hope that you would be an advocate for the programs that the Department of Labor funds, and in Connecticut for example, the plus-up in Connecticut doesn't do us a maximum amount of good without the Department of Labor dollars. So we can build additional submarines at Electric Boat, but if we don't have the workforce pipeline necessary to staff the supply chain, those jobs will go overseas.

At the Eastern CT Manufacturing Pipeline, it's not about mismatched resources, it's simply about not having enough resources. We have a 92 percent placement rate in manufacturing jobs from the pipeline program. Three-thousand people are trying to sign up and they can only take a couple hundred a year. And the consequence of not fulfilling that need is that the jobs will just go to other countries because we can't hire the folks here.

So let me ask you Senator Baldwin's question in a little a different way. Do you support the 20 percent cut that's been proposed to your department?

ACOSTA: So Senator, thank you for rephrasing because I never said that I accepted when I was speaking -- or I don't recall saying I accepted -- when I was speaking with Senator Baldwin.

I wrote myself a note when the skinny budget came out. And it was a quote from the OMB [Office of Management and Budget] director. And he said, to paraphrase, we've got $20 trillion in debt. And so it's not enough that a program sounds good, a program has to be shown to be good. And I wrote myself that note because, if confirmed as Secretary of Labor, one of the things that I want to do -- and I forget which of your colleagues had had great data -- but I want to go through these programs and compile the data. Because for a lot of these programs, I believe the rate of return on taxpayer -- an investment of taxpayer dollar -- is quite significant and would pay for itself very readily in money saved and taxes paid by the fact that individuals have jobs. And so I readily embrace that as part of the job, and if confirmed, I'm certainly going to speak up and present all that information and advocate.

MURPHY: I think you will find an abundance of programs that are underfunded that will allow you to make that case.

Lastly, I appreciate the number of times in which you've made references to the intersection between the Department of Education and the Department of Labor. The fact of the matter is -- as Senator Alexander pointed out -- you know, most of the workforce training in this country is funded by the Department of Education.

You and I had the chance to talk in my office about the migration of public dollars away from not-for-profit education to for-profit education and really the stunning lack of results we're getting from for-profit job training programs. One-third of for-profit graduates are today making less than a minimum wage over the course of a year. Twelve percent of students are attending for-profit schools, but 36% of students who have loan defaults today come from those for-profit schools.

I know you've thought about this in the context of your work in graduate education in Florida. Shouldn't there be a role for the federal government to ask more of all centers of job training, not just the ones you fund, but of colleges as well and demand results--results that we're not getting today from a lot of these for-profit operations?

ACOSTA: Senator, I have thought of it in the context of law. In law schools, the accrediting agencies are looking more for results. It's less about the input and more about the output. What is the bar passage rate? What is the job rate? And what you are seeing is that some of the for-profit law schools are facing challenges and have faced challenges with the Department of Education because they haven't--the results are not necessarily on par. So to the extent that these are Department of Labor programs, I certainly would want to see the results and the metrics to make sure that it is being done appropriately.

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