EV Jobs at Risk

Federal funding for clean energy projects faces an uncertain future, which could upend nascent workforce training programs at many community colleges. Also, the administration nixes education data research contracts, and an essay from JFF and the Data Quality Campaign on questions for Trump’s labor secretary nominee.

Uncertainty About Clean Energy Workforce Pipeline

With legal and political battles unfolding every day, it’s hard to handicap which of the Trump administration’s federal spending pauses will stick. But subsidies for EVs and clean energy are among the most at risk, with potentially big repercussions for jobs and workforce development projects across those industries.

Biden-era tax credits and grants have helped to spur $162B in private sector–led investments in clean energy manufacturing and deployment, according to new data from Atlas Public Policy, a research firm. Those projects include 166K announced jobs and the construction of 602 production facilities.

Workforce development pros have been working to develop education and training pipelines for those expected jobs. Red states are where most of that action is occurring, with 77% of clean energy investment going to Republican districts.

EV battery production could require as many 310K workers by 2030, the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research found in a recent report. More than two-thirds of that projected job growth would be roles that do not require four-year degrees, with specialized education and training provided through community colleges, apprenticeships, and on-the-job training.

For example, 10 Southeastern states were slated to receive roughly $1B in federal money through an EV infrastructure program run by the U.S. Department of Transportation and congressionally appropriated through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, according to a report from associations of state energy and transportation officials and Duke University. 

That program is among those paused by an executive order from Trump, which calls for a 90-day review to ensure that clean energy projects are aligned with the administration’s energy policy. The Transportation Department said it was suspending approval of all related state EV infrastructure deployment plans, while reimbursing existing obligations until it issues new guidance.

The groups’ report found 34 colleges participating in EV workforce development consortiums across the 10 states, and dozens of institutions that are offering training programs or courses in EV manufacturing, maintenance and service, or charging infrastructure. 

For example, Kentucky’s Elizabethtown Community and Technical College partnered with Ford to create a 42K-square-foot training facility for EV battery production. Launched last June with $25M in state funding, the ECTC BlueOval SK Training Center is training workers for an anticipated 5K well-paying new jobs at a nearby manufacturing plant for Ford’s future EVs.

A $9.6B loan from the U.S. Department of Energy is financing the construction of that facility, as well as one in Tennessee and another in Kentucky. That loan was recently finalized and appears to be safe for now, although that’s not entirely clear. Other federal loans for clean energy projects likely face more risk.

Ford could be forced to lay off workers if the White House ends subsidies and loans for EV factories in those states and in Ohio and Michigan, Jim Farley, Ford’s CEO, said at a conference this week, reports Jack Ewing for The New York Times.

“Many of those jobs will be at risk,” Farley said.

State of Play: Before Trump took office, some EV production facilities in the U.S. were struggling with sluggish demand, rising costs, and foreign competition. But the uncertainty about federal funding is likely to complicate a wide range of EV projects and related workforce training programs.

State attorneys general from 22 blue states and a federal judge say the Trump administration is continuing to block access to federal grants for state clean energy and climate programs under the Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure law, despite a court order to keep the money flowing.

Republicans criticized the Biden administration’s flurry to complete billions of dollars in federal loans during the home stretch of his term. GOP lawmakers and at least one Democratic senator also bashed slow progress by states in creating EV charging stations with federal money.

Experts and advocates who focus on workforce development largely have been mum about potential freezes and cuts to clean energy money. Some sources say they are waiting until they have a better handle on the shifting federal funding landscape. The situation is changing too quickly to comment on it publicly, they say.

The uncertainty could pose challenges for already complex timing and coordination that goes into creating workforce development pipelines for EV and other clean energy industry projects.

For example, 30K workers are projected to be employed in battery production in Michigan alone by 2030. Detroit-based reporter Ethan Bakuli wrote last year for Work Shift about how the city teamed up with Ford, Google, and mobility tech startups to help thousands of the city’s underemployed residents get education and training to break into EV-related careers.

Armed with federal, state, and corporate money, workforce development organizations began offering training like an eight-week program for EV charging station maintenance technicians. But one graduate, Marcus Glenn, told Bakuli that he had failed to land a job after completing the program six months earlier.

“Gradually things are opening up, but it’s still pretty slimmed up,” Glenn said.

Junking Education Data

The Trump administration terminated $881M in contracts at the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences this week—stopping research and the collection of data on everything from how to help K-12 students recover from pandemic learning loss to whether student aid recipients land jobs after graduation. 

The move comes even as many federal and state lawmakers have been pushing for a better understanding of outcomes and more accountability for colleges. The cuts were made by the Elon Musk–led Department of Government Efficiency, and the administration did not share what contracts were canceled. However, officials said the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), or “the nation’s report card,” and the College Scorecard and College Navigator would not be impacted. 

Researchers with direct knowledge of the canceled contracts said privately and in public forums that reports like the Digest of Education Statistics and studies like the High School Longitudinal Survey (HSLS) and the congressionally mandated National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS) have been eliminated.

In the workforce world, the HSLS is used to understand outcomes such as how students in career and technical education fare after graduating—while NPSAS forms the backbone for several longitudinal studies that examine whether aid recipients earn credentials and how much income they make later in life. Those studies appear to have been targeted because they are conducted under contract, rather than through grants, which are more difficult to rescind.

Mark Schneider, a veteran education data expert and the IES director during the first Trump and the Biden administration, said in a webinar hosted by Bellwether that the move by DOGE was overly abrupt and the consequences perhaps not thought through. But Schneider said he nevertheless hopes the move will create an opportunity to reform IES. Much of the data its National Center for Education Statistics collects, for example, is backward-looking. What policymakers, educators, and students need instead is real-time data and forward-looking indicators, he said.

“We’ve broken a lot of stuff that needed to be broken. What is the vision for how we’re going to rebuild what needs to be rebuilt?” Schneider said.

The administration has not shared any vision beyond what DOGE said about cost cutting on Musk’s X platform. And many data experts—including those who agree with the need for reform—are worried there is no plan. “This seems like an arbitrary and capricious cancellation of contracts,” Rachel Dinkes, president and CEO of the Knowledge Alliance, said during the webinar. —By Elyse Ashburn

Open Tabs

Stuck in Place
The sharp decline of geographic mobility in the U.S. is the single most important social change of the past half century, Yoni Appelbaum writes in The Atlantic. Just 20% of American workers relocate from one metropolitan area to another over a decade. People also too often cannot afford to move to places with growing industries and high-paying jobs, leading to a decline of their economic prospects as well as those of their children.

GenAI and Jobs
About 36% of occupations are now using generative AI for at least a quarter of their tasks, according to a new economic index from Anthropic analyzing millions of interactions with its Claude model. Not surprisingly, generative AI use is heavily concentrated in software development and writing tasks. Perhaps most interesting will be the way that task and job impacts evolve over time—which Anthropic will now be publicly tracking with regular updates to the index. The company also is making the underlying data available to researchers.

Worker-Centric AI Adoption
Technological advancements, accelerated through AI adoption, are shortening the useful life of some specialized skills and creating challenges for skills training to keep up with the rapid pace of change, according to an occupational analysis from JFF’s Center for Artificial Intelligence & the Future of Work. The center also released tool kits for training providers and small business leaders to support worker-centric AI adoption and workforce development strategies.

Skills-First Hiring
Half of all states have policies emphasizing skills-based hiring for government roles, and those with such policies are less likely to require degrees than states without them, according to an analysis by the National Governors Association. In Virginia, roles without degree requirements jumped from 58% of job postings in 2019 to 90% in 2024, while Maryland moved from 36% to 52% over the same time period. In Pennsylvania, 60% of new hires—not just postings for them—don’t hold degrees.

Shorter-Term Credentials
Microcredentials belong in the four-year college sector as well as at community colleges and workforce organizations, according to a brief HCM’s Kristin Hultquist and Stephanie Murphy wrote for the Manhattan Institute. Shorter-term credentials can improve the ROI of four-year degrees, better align skills of graduates with market demands, increase transparency, and create greater responsiveness to labor-market changes.

STEM at Community Colleges
Producing community college graduates in STEM fields that employers require is important for worker advancement and future economic growth, concludes a qualitative study supported by the U.S. Department of Education. The ability for graduates to communicate technical skills is crucial, the researchers found. The study calls for engaging employers in instruction and designing curricula with strong components of literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving.

Job Moves
Nicholas Kent has been nominated as U.S. under secretary of education, the top administration position focused on higher education. Kent is currently Virginia’s deputy secretary of education. Prior to that he was chief policy officer for Career Education Colleges and Universities, a trade group for the for-profit college industry. The Education Department last week announced additional appointees.

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