Job Corps Is Gone. The Street Is What’s Left
TikToks show students packing up their lives in garbage bags. This isn’t efficiency. It’s cruelty.
The kids didn’t even see it coming.
One day they were in welding class. Or studying for the GED they had failed twice before. Or learning how to make hospital beds at 6 a.m. sharp. The next, they were dragging garbage bags down city streets. Their lives packed in plastic. No warning. No plan.
On May 29, the Trump administration & U.S. Department of Labor ordered the closure of every Job Corps center in the country. All 99 sites were to be emptied. They called it a “phased pause.” What followed looked more like a mass eviction.
The shutdown was supposed to happen by June 30. That was the official line. But videos began circulating from students across the country of kids being kicked out as early as June 2.
Job Corps The Last System That Hadn’t Given Up on Them
On TikTok, the kids were begging. Not metaphorically. Literally. Teenagers and twenty-somethings filmed themselves in dorm rooms and cafeterias, pleading with the government not to shut down Job Corps. Some were weeks away from earning their GEDs. Others were just shy of finishing their certifications: CNA licenses, HVAC credentials, food safety cards, welding certs. Many had nowhere to go if the doors closed.
One student shared a video on TikTok stating, “my job corps instructor gave me a coat so I don’t freeze sleeping outside.”
These weren’t influencers chasing clout. They were poor kids with no backup, livestreaming their eviction from the last system that hadn’t given up on them. The shutdown wasn’t just a policy decision. It was a broadcast tragedy, playing out in real time on phones across America. All in the name of “efficiency.”
And still, the Department of Labor claimed this was about helping them. They said they wanted “better outcomes.”
Better than housing? Better than food, therapy, education, and job training under one roof? Better than stability, structure, and the first place some of these kids had ever been safe?
Is “better” the fucking street?
Because that’s where many of them are now. Some were sent back to abusive households, to the very environments they escaped. Others were given no destination at all. Just a date. Just a bus ticket. Just a good luck.
And then came the lie: that this was about fiscal responsibility. That the Trump administration had no choice.
What makes this shutdown even more outrageous is that it may not even be legal. Job Corps was created by an act of Congress, and Congress continues to appropriate funds for it every year. Under the Appropriations Clause of the U.S. Constitution, the power of the purse belongs to Congress & not the president. The executive branch cannot simply decide not to spend money that Congress has already allocated.
The Supreme Court has affirmed this repeatedly. In cases like Train v. City of New York (1975), the Court made it clear: a president cannot refuse to carry out a duly passed appropriation simply because they disagree with the policy.
Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin called it what it is. “Congress appropriated funding for Job Corps,” she said on May 31. “The Trump Administration can’t just decide to not spend it because they want to make room for tax cuts for billionaires.”
So let’s be honest here. Not only is it BS. Not only is illegal. But you cannot claim to want better for these kids and then throw them into the void. We are not helping them. We are failing them if we let him get away with this.
The Intent
Job Corps began in 1964 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. Modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps from the Great Depression, it was designed to lift struggling youth out of survival mode and into purpose. But this was more than just a job training program. It provided housing, food, education, therapy, and medical care. It gave poor, Black, Brown, and rural youth not just skills, but a shot at stability. For many, it was the first place that offered safety, structure, and belief.
And that made it dangerous. Programs like this do not get shut down because they fail. They get shut down because they succeed for the wrong people. Job Corps worked for the kids this country is built to forget. It interrupted the pipeline from poverty to prison, from foster care to homelessness. It created functioning adults from the rubble of systemic abandonment. In a political era that rewards cruelty and cuts, that made it a liability.
The Trump administration could not kill it outright, not at first. So they started with the data.
The so-called “transparency report” told a bleak story. A graduation rate under forty percent. A per-student cost higher than four years of college. Thousands of so-called serious incidents. But the numbers were built to lie. They pulled from a pandemic-constrained year when enrollment was frozen by federal mandate. Centers were half-empty. Programs were paused. Then they pointed at the emptiness they created and used it to justify the shutdown.
They starved it, then blamed it for being hungry.
The per-student cost was inflated by years of flat funding and facility overhead. It lumped together housing, food, therapy, education, medical care, and full-time vocational training, then compared it to college tuition and called it a waste. The “serious incidents” included asthma attacks, panic episodes, and fights between teenagers who had already been through hell.
This was not oversight. It was sabotage.
They wanted Job Corps gone. So they built the autopsy before the body was even cold and when the shutdown came, they called it a pause. They said it was temporary. They said something better would take its place. But there is no better. There is no plan. There is only the street.
Fox News cheered. Think tanks called it long overdue. The students (many just weeks away from finishing their GEDs, their welding certs, their CNA licenses) were forced out with nothing.
This was never about outcomes. It was about eliminating one of the last Great Society programs that dared to serve the public without turning a profit. All in the name of giving billionaires a tax break. Because in Trump’s America, loyalty flows to those who pay for it. And there is no campaign kickback in compassion.
This is how you dismantle a safety net. Not with tanks. Not with slogans. But with spreadsheets. With manipulated data. With policy designed to fail. You do not ask where the kids are going. You erase the evidence they ever existed.
You want to know how democracy dies? It dies in silence. It dies when compassion becomes too expensive. It dies when the poor are punished for surviving long enough to need help. It dies when the abandonment of children is called reform.
What Comes Next
So what do we do now? Those of us who still give a damn?
We organize. We speak out. We amplify the voices of the very students who have been silenced. Former Job Corps graduates are raising money for displaced students, offering rides, a couch to sleep on, or just a voice on the other end of the phone reminding them they are not invisible. If the federal government refuses to be the safety net, then we become the net ourselves.
If you know of any mutual aid efforts helping Job Corps students right now, please share them in the comments. Do not assume someone else will.
Call your representatives. Demand hearings. Demand accountability. Congress funded this program. The Trump administration & had no constitutional authority to gut it just because they wanted to make room for billionaire tax breaks. If we let this go unanswered, we are setting the stage for the next cut, the next eviction, the next betrayal.
This was not just a policy failure. It is another test. A test of who we are. A test of what we will tolerate. A test of how loudly we will scream when the people in power start erasing those they do not see as profitable. Job Corps was a life line for many teenagers & young adults. A line between stability and the street. Between survival and total collapse. The administration did not just cross that line. They severed it and if we let it stand, we are telling every poor, Black, Brown, disabled, or abandoned kid in this country that they were always disposable.
This is not just about politics. This is about whether we believe kids deserve a chance. This is not reform. This is rot. So speak. Share. Show up. Be the reckoning.
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What the hell is the point of doing away with this excellent program?! It’s just mean. Keep taking away from the poorest among us and you won’t like the outcome
All kids deserve a chance. Speak up. Speak out.