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Fox
News
Audit
finds bloated budget for
green jobs training despite lack of open positions
By Perry Chiaramonte
August 04, 2013
A
federal audit shows that nearly a
half-billion dollars in government funds was spent on training workers
for
so-called “green jobs.” The only problem is that not enough positions
in the
growing industry exist.
The
findings -- released in a June
report by the Government Accountability Office -- showed that only 55
percent
of those trained were able to place in a new job, many of which were
not
technically green jobs. The $501 million in funding came from the 2009
stimulus
law. The report also uncovered that the Department of Labor created a
framework
that led grantees to broadly interpret the program’s definition to
include any
job “that could be linked, directly or indirectly, to a beneficial
outcome”
which led to the gap between training programs and available green
industry
jobs.
“The
moral of the story is that you
need to know in some detail the nature of the economy you’re serving
when you
fund job training efforts.”
-
Mark Muro, Policy Director,
Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings
“Our
report suggests that the
department identifies the lessons learned,” Andrew Sherrill, a
spokesperson for
the GAO, told FoxNews.com. “A lot of these programs were created before
there
were clear job definitions for the industry."
Sherrill
adds that other factors
contributed, such as the recession hitting around the same time as the
grant
program and trainees having to compete with unemployed, skilled
tradesmen
looking for new work.
The
GAO suggests in the report that
the Labor Department find ways to improve job training associated with
emerging
industries like green tech in the future.
“Basically,
this is what can happen
when you fund large programs amid much uncertainty and when there’s too
little
data available,” Mark Muro, senior fellow and policy director for the
Brookings
Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, told FoxNews.com...
Read
the rest of the article at Fox News
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