John Boehner: “Mr. Chairman, what we have before us is the Reauthorization of the Workforce Investment Act. It was first passed in…”

“Mr. Chairman, what we have before us is the Reauthorization of the Workforce Investment Act. It was first passed in 1998. These one-stop centers that have been created all over the country to help the people gain skills and to increase their skills are a critical part of what we need to do if we are going to have a successful economy over the next 10, 20 and even 50 years. What we have done in this reauthorization is tried to make these one-stop centers work even better. We believe that by consolidating the three separate funding streams, three different sets of employees, three different sets of books, we can gain more flexibility for the local workforce boards and thereby freeing up more dollars to be used to actually train workers. We believe strongly that the youth services money here ought to be directed for the most part to out of school youth, a population that is vastly underserved and we do that in this bill. We also believe that faith-based providers, especially in large urban centers, can provide a very necessary outreach to help those who are really needy have an opportunity to get the kind of training and retraining they need to become productive members of our society. I think what we have here is a very good bill.”