Congress locked working mothers out of the job training it just promised them — by building a door with three locks on it.
Datrina Hurt is 37, a mother of two, currently unemployed, and she sat in a St. Paul College classroom this May practicing with a fake urine bag and a bedpan. She is working toward a Certified Nursing Assistant credential, a 112-hour program that places graduates in $20-an-hour jobs at nursing homes. She paid more than $1,000 out of her income tax return to take the class. “I figured, I can do a small investment in my life,” she told NPR. “Why not?” She should not have had to. The federal Workforce Pell Grant — the first major expansion of Pell in a generation, written into the 2025 reconciliation law the legislation’s authors called the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” a name that tells you everything about the disconnect between the people writing the legislation and the people living its consequences — was supposed to cover exactly the kind of program Datrina enrolled in. The Department of Education and the Congressional Budget Office estimated 100,000 students could benefit by the fall of 2027. The regulatory architecture, when you actually look at it, makes that estimate a number written for a press release, not a number written for a 37-year-old mother emptying catheter bags in May.
The gap between a federal promise and a working mother’s reality is 38 hours. Just under a five-day work week. Workforce Pell only funds programs between 150 and 599 instructional hours, lasting 8 to 14 weeks, training for a state-classified in-demand field, with documented earnings and job placements. Datrina’s CNA program is 112 hours. North Idaho College’s CNA program does qualify, but only five of its programs will apply this year. The 150-hour floor alone excludes a significant share of the country’s existing short-term training infrastructure — the part low-income students actually use, because it is the part that fits inside a working family’s time and money.
When I sat at my own kitchen table at eleven at night doing the math on my household’s childcare and student loans, the realization was not that I was failing to budget. The realization was that the structure was designed to keep me moving the same numbers between the same two columns, and that I had the structural privileges of a two-income household and a grandmother’s estate to absorb the shocks. Datrina Hurt is facing a different column, and she does not have that padding. She paid with her tax return.
Taylor Swift wrote a song about it. “this is me trying,” from folklore, catalogues the small acts of staying functional and refuses to make them look heroic. Datrina Hurt, paying for a CNA class with her tax return and practicing with a bedpan in a St. Paul classroom, is “this is me trying” in 112 hours. The chorus — “I just wanted you to know that this is me trying” — is the analytical moment: the labor of trying is the work, and the work deserves the policy that was promised to it.
Sara Goldrick-Rab, who runs the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice at Temple University, has spent two decades documenting the federal financial-aid system’s failure to match the students it serves. The maximum Pell Grant once covered something on the order of 80% of the cost of attending a four-year public university; by the standard estimates used in the field it now covers closer to a quarter. The Workforce Pell expansion, on paper, is a return to the original Pell idea — money that follows the student into the credential, whatever the credential is. In practice, the regulatory architecture is a return to the old Pell problem: money that follows the student only after the student has navigated a maze of program-length, state-list, and data-tracking requirements that almost no short-term program can meet.
Only 11 states have published the in-demand lists on which Workforce Pell eligibility depends. Florida has named 31 career certificates. Michigan has named 267 occupations. The other 39 states have not gotten there yet, and the lists differ so much that a phlebotomy certificate might qualify in Tallahassee and disqualify in Lansing. For the programs that do qualify, schools need data systems capable of tracking certificate earners’ employment and earnings — systems that have existed for years at four-year colleges, and that almost no community college has built for non-degree credentials. Where the systems do not exist, schools rely on survey data. That is: someone at the school calls the graduate, or the graduate fills out a form, and that is the basis on which the federal money the policy is supposed to deliver actually flows. Carrie Warick-Smith, who runs federal policy at the Association of Community College Trustees, told NPR she thinks January is the optimistic start date. The 100,000 students the bill was estimated to help were estimated to be helped by fall 2027.
Swift also wrote a song about the other side of the same exchange. “right where you left me,” from evermore, is about being frozen in time, still sitting cross-legged in the dim light of the same restaurant, waiting for a reality that has already moved on. The federal bureaucracy is trapped in its own bridge: it is operating on a set of assumptions about what a worker and a program look like that do not map onto the actual economy. It is an administrative architecture built for the 1970s, deployed in 2026, and the collateral damage is absorbed by women like Datrina Hurt.
Anne Helen Petersen documented in Can’t Even that millennials have been trained to understand themselves as human capital, walking resumes that just need the right optimization to succeed. The implicit promise of that optimization regime was that if you put in the hours and got the certificate, the market would reward you. But the market is not the bottleneck here; the state is. Congress built a labyrinth, put the minotaur in the middle, and told the people at the bottom of the income distribution that they just need to navigate it better. They call it workforce training, but the reality is that it is a barrier to entry disguised as a subsidy.
The pro-family direction here is not complicated. The structural conditions of work, family, and caregiving in this country are not solved by individual choice, and they are not solved by the existence of a benefit. They are solved by the implementation. The CNA classroom at St. Paul College is the implementation. The income tax return is the implementation. The 11 states that have published lists, the programs that are 112 hours long, the community colleges that have not yet built data systems — these are the implementation. Tie the Workforce Pell hour requirements directly to the actual state-level regulatory and licensing mandates for the credential. If a state board or industry standard dictates that 112 hours is what it takes to safely train a certified nursing assistant, the federal grant covers those 112 hours — period, not an arbitrary 150-hour box. Fund the administrative data infrastructure so community colleges can track certificate outcomes without relying on self-reported surveys, treating the working adult as the default student rather than an edge case.
This is also the moral question the architecture forces. Dorothy Day’s point — that the Gospel takes away our right to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor — is not a quote to admire and put down. It is a working test for the eligibility regime Congress built. A federal student-aid policy that builds its first-year eligibility on a 150-hour floor, a state list 39 states have not published, and a data system almost no community college has built, discriminates by program, by state, and by institutional capacity, in a country where the students who need the credential cannot afford to wait for the architecture to catch up to the promise. The corporal works of mercy are a list of obligations a household actually performs. Training the workforce that performs them is also a work of mercy. The list is operational. The training was supposed to be operational too.
Datrina Hurt paid more than a thousand dollars out of pocket because she took her tax return and bought a seat in a classroom. I write this from a household that can absorb the cost of a CNA class — two college-educated parents who navigated my financial-aid paperwork, a rowhouse bought on a down payment that included a grandparent’s estate. Datrina Hurt was paying with her tax return. She is doing the work. Congress just needs to do its job and let her in.