Political Quotes

“I want to thank the chairman, and I also want to thank the gentlelady from North Carolina--I'm not sure if she's here right now--for her efforts to make necessary and meaningful changes and reforms to the SKILLS Act. The Federal Government spends literally billions and billions of dollars on workforce training programs every single year. But in 2011, there was a study done by the GAO, the Government Accountability Office. They found that very little is actually known about the effectiveness of a lot of these programs. So when we're here at a time of constrained spending and constrained budgets, we have to do everything we can from both sides of the aisle to ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent wisely and that the recipients of these dollars or the programs actually get an effective program at the end of the day. So the SKILLS Act that's before us now includes provisions mandating--this is good--meaningful evaluations of these very same programs. But simply mandating that evaluations be done doesn't really guarantee that they will actually be conducted. For example, back in 1998, there was the Workforce Investment Act legislation, and it mandated that the Department of Labor conduct what they called then the gold standard, if you will, of studies, of job training programs, and required that those studies be done by 2005. But here as we stand here now in 2013, those studies still aren't done.…”