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The GAO found that $18 billion went to 47 different federal training programs for job training. Apart from the overlap in target beneficiary populations it turns out that only 5 of the 47 programs have been studied for whether job training improved the trainees' chances of actually landing a job.
Somehow organizations get so overwhelmed when they scope a new project ( e.g. job training) they seem to overlook the need for outcome assessment. It is very likely that all these training programs had a survey of the trainer's course delivery and whether the training was effective from the students' point of view.
But the programs did not take the next step to have some post-training tracking of the participants. This is supposed to be routine in higher education and for purposes of ranking of different educational institutions by the press, educational associations,accreditation agencies etc.
So it's sort of surprising that outcome assessment is not built into the plan of each federal training program. Today, you need to probably just send out an email survey to track the alumni of a federal training program at a defined interval. Better still is to just have a Facebook page for the program and keep track of how trainees do eventually!
It's not enough to just axe programs without fixing these basic problems. As the job market improves,good job training should deliver outcomes and those outcomes need to be tracked. Based on this tracking of outcomes training needs to be modified for higher effectiveness.