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Last week, President Obama announced the creation of a $600 million grant program to help prepare people for jobs that are currently going unfilled. It’s good that the President is giving the issue of workforce development some greatly needed attention, but I fear his unilateral approach will be counterproductive. The jumbled, confusing federal workforce development system currently spends $18 billion on 47 different programs spread across nine agencies. Putting a $600 million layer of gloss on this mess is unlikely to generate positive results for workers who need to improve their education. 

There is longstanding, bipartisan agreement that the system as currently structured is broken. In his 2012 State of the Union, President Obama called for “Cut[ing] through the maze of training programs” in order to do something about jobs going unfilled due to a lack of skilled workers. The House responded by passing the SKILLS Act, which I authored, with bipartisan support more than a year ago. 

This legislation would streamline 35 duplicative programs, 26 of which were identified as ineffective in a 2011 non-partisan Government Accountability Office report. The SKILLS Act would empower job creators, promote accountability and give workers access to the resources they need to fill in demand jobs. Unfortunately, our colleagues in the Democrat-led Senate have let this important bill languish.

In his most recent State of the Union, the President renewed his call for reform on this issue, tasking Vice President Biden to lead “an across-the-board reform of America’s training programs to make sure they have one mission: Train Americans with the skills employers need and match them to good jobs that need to be filled right now.” This week’s $600 million grant program is the first result of that effort. News reports indicate this grant program was chosen in order to bypass a “divided” Congress.

The President repeatedly says that he wants to work with Congress to get things done, but the current status of the SKILLS Act gives one pause. Unfortunately, Senate inaction on this legislation isn’t an isolated occurrence. The simple truth is that there is a myriad of legislation that has already passed by the House of Representatives and could serve as the starting point of fruitful debate in the Senate for many of the priorities that the President has repeatedly expressed an interest in working on.  

The President has said that our focus should be on jobs. My colleagues in the House agree. The SKILLS Act and more than thirty different jobs bills are awaiting action in the Senate. Many of these bills could provide desperately needed help for our economy. For five years the House of Representatives has made a priority of addressing jobs and the economy. We have passed legislation that would help, but we can’t do it alone.

The SKILLS Act would provide desperately needed reforms to the broken federal workforce development system without piling on more programs and more wasteful, inefficient spending to the existing structure. There is bipartisan support for these common sense reforms that would promote accountability and help put people back to work. I urge President Obama to come to the table, use his influence with his party leaders in the Senate and help forge legislative compromises on the SKILLS Act. Perhaps this could be the starting point for action on many other vital issues that need our attention. Working together, we can get things done.