Congressional Labor Caucus Leaders Urge Trump Administration to Support Registered Apprenticeship Programs

WASHINGTON, DC — Yesterday, Representatives Seth Magaziner (RI-02) and Nikki Budzinski (IL-13), co-leads of the Congressional Labor Caucus Building Trades Task Force along with Congressional Labor Caucus Co-Chairs Donald Norcross (NJ-01), Debbie Dingell (MI-06), Steven Horsford (NV-04), and Mark Pocan (WI-02), sent a letter to Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer urging her to prioritize proven, high-quality Registered Apprenticeship Programs in the Administration’s upcoming workforce development plan. 

In April, President Trump issued an Executive Order entitled “Preparing Americans forHigh-Paying Skilled Trade Jobs of the Future” that calls for the Secretaries of Labor, Commerce, and Education to develop a plan to reach 1 million new active apprentices nationwide. The Representatives’ letter urges the Administration to ensure this plan supports high-quality Registered Apprenticeship models with strong track records of placing apprentices in good-paying jobs, as opposed to low-road employers that exploit workers. 

“Registered Apprenticeship Programs are the gold standard for workforce training. Through years of demonstrated success, these programs have a proven track record of high graduation and job placement rates in high wage careers for workers” the lawmakers wrote. 

You can read the full text of the letter here and below.

Dear Secretary Chavez-DeRemer:

As leaders of the Congressional Labor Caucus, we are writing in response to the April 23, 2025, Executive Order entitled “Preparing Americans for High-Paying Skilled Trade Jobs of the Future,” which directs the Secretary of Labor, the Secretary of Commerce, and the Secretary of Education to prepare a plan to reach and surpass one million new active Registered Apprentices. As you work with your counterparts in the Departments of Education and Commerce to finalize this plan, we urge you to prioritize proven, high-quality Registered Apprenticeship Programs (RAPs) in your efforts to grow the number of apprentices across the country.

RAPs are the gold standard for workforce training. Through generations of demonstrated success, these programs have a proven track record of high graduation and job placement rates for workers, while also prioritizing safety, wage progression, and equal employment opportunities for Registered Apprentices. The quintessential model for these programs is in the building trades where labor unions and their contractor partners annually invest over $2.5 billion in private money for joint apprenticeship training centers (JATCs). These joint labor-management management programs provide debt-free, high-quality training forindividuals seeking a career in construction, not training for one job. As the Department considers approaches to grow the overall number of Registered Apprentices, we urge you to do so in a manner that builds on the successes of the building trades unions’ high-quality RAPs and JATCs and to not take any regulatory actions that would threaten to disrupt these programs.

As the Department develops its Registered Apprenticeship plan, we also encourage you to identify steps to solidify the quality of pre-apprentice and career and technical education (CTE) programs. Accordingly, we urge you to ensure that CTE and pre-apprenticeship programs have a documented partnership with at least one RAP. This will help ensure participants not only receive quality preparation from their program and for a RAP, but also, upon completion of the program, have a clear pipeline into a Registered Apprenticeship. 

In the strongest terms possible, we also recommend that your plan does not support subpar training programs that claim to train workers, but instead lead to low-quality jobs or no job at all. Given the high praise that the Department and President Trump have given to Registered Apprenticeship programs, it would be a departure for the Administration to bolster low-road employers that exploit workers. Among other enforcement and quality control measures, the Department should require the public disclosure of the actual wage rates and wage advancement schedule of working Registered Apprentices by program sponsors, as well as barring sponsors who are debarred or suspended from government contracts from registering new RAPs during the term of the debarment or suspension.

We agree that there is a need for more Registered Apprenticeships to train the skilled workers necessary to grow our 21st century economy. As your Department considers how to meet the laudable and ambitious goal of having more than one million new Registered Apprentices, we ask that you build on the success of high-quality RAPs and work with existing high-standard programs, particularly ones in the building trades unions, with a proven track record of training and placing Registered Apprentices.

Thank you for your attention to this letter and look forward to your response. We are eager to work with you on this issue, and please do not hesitate to contact us if the Congressional Labor Caucus can be of further assistance.