By Madeline Shannon
Very little of billions of dollars worth of federal grant money went to infrastructure workforce development, a new report published this month by the Brookings Institute shows.
The big picture: Between 2022 and 2024, $61.5 billion in federal grants awarded to California paid for infrastructure projects that saw work done on roads and bridges, public transit, greenhouse gas emission reduction projects, water quality projects, energy, broadband, urban forestry and other infrastructure areas, according to the report.
- However, for all the projects the money paid for, very little of it went to workforce development and job training to pay for occupational skills training and job placement, according to the report.
- “Ensuring that there are enough workers with the right skills to carry out infrastructure projects should be a standard consideration in project development and implementation,” Martha Ross and Zoë Dec, the report’s authors, wrote in the report. “Problems related to quality control, delays, and cost overruns are much more likely to occur if leaders and employers treat recruitment, training, and hiring as afterthoughts.”
- Ross, Dec and other employees of the Brookings Institute were not available for an interview about the report on Tuesday.
Zoom in: The main recommendations Ross made in the report included using “sector partnerships” to retain, recruit and place workers in infrastructure jobs, as well as launch efforts to recruit a wide diversity of workers, including young adults.
- Officials from the California State Transportation Agency, the California Department of Transportation and the California Transportation Commission were not available on Tuesday.
- According to another report by the Brookings Institute published in 2022, the federal government has awarded billions of dollars worth of infrastructure grants to pay for new projects and jobs on a scale not seen since the New Deal, the Great Depression-era federal jobs program that put unemployed workers back to work. The federal dollars the Brookings Institute’s 2022 report identified were allocated through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022.
- Another challenge to recruiting and training skilled workers in infrastructure jobs is deep cuts from the federal government to grant programs like the ones California has benefitted from, according to the report. After President Donald Trump started his second term in January 2025, nearly 70 grant awards totaling $7.5 billion expected by the state were cut — roughly 12% of federal grant funding awarded to California, according to Ross and Dec’s report.
Go deeper: With increasing unpredictability from the federal government, state agencies have attempted to address funding shortages caused by the federal cuts to grant programs. State and local leaders have the most control over planning infrastructure projects, the report states, which resulted this year in local and state agencies across California filling in the gaps formerly filled by the federal government.
- “Today’s investments show what it looks like when California chooses to lead with both urgency and intention,” said Toks Omishakin, the California Transportation Secretary, in the press release. “By expanding zero-emission options and strengthening infrastructure in every corner of the state, we are delivering on Governor Newsom’s vision to build a modern, sustainable transportation system for all.”
- Such efforts include $1.1 billion of state money to increase zero-emission transit projects, repair highways damaged by storms, fix bridges falling into disrepair and other infrastructure projects, according to a press release from the governor’s office.
