With most of the vote from Tuesday’s midterm elections counted, the result is crystal clear: Democrats won a generational victory, seizing comfortable majorities in both houses of Congress, as well as a majority of governorships and hundreds of state legislative seats across the country. Their projected final popular vote margin of 12-14 points is the largest in more than fifty years.

Not surprisingly, the national trend held up in reliably blue New York, where Governor Kathy Hochul easily secured a second full term and Democrats up and down the ticket celebrated victories. It was a very good night for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani too: NYC voters approved all five initiatives on the ballot, and a number of candidates identifying as democratic socialists won election to Congress.

Now the question is what this all will mean for the workforce field in NYC and beyond. We offer six observations.

1. This wasn’t a “workforce election” per se. But it could turn out to be a very good election for workforce issues.

The easiest way to understand the 2026 midterms is that voters were primarily motivated by economic distress, in particular stubbornly high prices for fuel and other necessities, and frustration that the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress did not seem focused on delivering help. They will be looking for action from the incoming Democratic majorities, and  workforce policy belongs at the center of that response.

Affordability depends on what people earn and what things cost. Connecting someone to a job means little if that job doesn’t pay enough to cover rent and food, requires hours that change every week, or offers no opportunity to advance. More effective workforce policies must measure success beyond placement: higher pay, consistent schedules, benefits, and a real path forward. Those are tangible returns on public investment—and a way to rebuild confidence that the government can deliver for working people.

One major Democratic priority–to reverse cuts to Medicaid and restore subsidies to access healthcare under the Affordable Care Act–has significant labor market implications. Medicaid work requirements scheduled to take effect in January threaten to both leave more Americans without health coverage, and to further strain the workforce system as recipients attempt to record enough hours in job search or related activities to remain on the rolls. Between Democrats’ Senate majority falling short of the 60 votes required to break a filibuster, and the prospect of a presidential veto blocking any attempt to undo the cuts, prospects of short-term action are dubious. Meanwhile, low-income workers and service providers will grapple with the tension between demanding that people work to be eligible for healthcare coverage, and denying them coverage that helps keep them healthy enough for steady employment.

Another question is whether the advent of divided government might spur job growth. The logic, as set forth by Harvard Business School professor Vincent Pons, is that congressional majorities can check a president of the opposing party, ensuring more predictable policies that could render businesses more confident in making investments and consumers more willing to spend. In New York City and elsewhere, this could lead to new employer commitments to hire, train, and promote workers.

2. The Republican-led threat to WIOA funding is almost certainly over.

In both federal budget cycles since President Trump returned to office, his administration has proposed devastating cuts to federal workforce investments, focusing on the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA). Thanks in large part to determined advocacy and a critical mass of reluctant Republicans in Congress, those cuts were rejected in 2025 and were quickly dismissed this year as the midterms approached. The administration’s other disruptive workforce proposals, including combining WIOA and a dozen workforce programs into a block grant and ending programs such as Job Corps, are also all but off the table.

As Congressman John Mannion discussed on the NYC Workforce Drop, defending federal workforce investment takes sustained advocacy and congressional partners willing to fight for it. That work must continue—and so must the push to ensure these investments deliver better jobs, higher wages, and opportunities to advance.

3. Rethinking WIOA: The Case for Something Better?

Over the next two years, both the House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce and the Senate HELP (Health, Education, Labor and Pensions) Committee are likely to focus on undoing the Trump administration’s deep cuts to Affordable Care Act subsidies, Medicaid, and other social safety net programs passed in 2025’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” and reversing the president’s moves to dismantle the federal Department of Education. It remains to be seen whether the midterm results will lead to a revival of the A Stronger Workforce for America (ASWA) Act, which would have reauthorized WIOA and largely continued federal workforce policy on its established path of prioritizing job placement with little regard for quality or workers’ economic mobility. ASWA was on track to pass into law as part of a budget reconciliation measure in December 2024, until Republicans removed it from the bill. Early indications from initiatives like National Skills Coalition’s A New Promise of Work suggest that the field is interested in a broader reconsideration of workforce issues.

4. Personnel drives policy—so keep an eye on two key congressional committees.

Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA), currently the ranking member of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, strongly supported ASWA. Scott works well with outgoing chair Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI), who won his re-election bid; if they effectively switch roles, they could push to revive ASWA as a rare bipartisan measure. Scott is likely to face a challenge for the gavel, however, from Reps. Jahana Hayes (D-CT) and Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR). In Senate HELP, meanwhile, democratic socialist icon Bernie Sanders has served as ranking member and is likely to become chair if he chooses to pursue it. The outgoing chair, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), lost his primary earlier this year, and several other Republican committee members, including Susan Collins (R-ME) and Roger Marshall (R-KS), were defeated on Tuesday.  As the most senior Republican left on the committee, Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) is poised to become the ranking member.  Committee leadership elections will take place and full membership lists will be finalized in November and December.

5. With federal stalemate likely, the real action could be in Albany.

It’s not impossible to imagine President Trump finding common ground with two fellow New Yorkers, presumptive House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries and likely Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. As a historically bipartisan issue, workforce could emerge as a point of consensus, with ASWA as a starting point. But given the vast ideological divide between the two parties and the backdrop of Democratic investigations targeting the president and administration—not to mention the start of the 2028 presidential election cycle—the odds are against any major new policy over the next two years. Energy for reform may be better focused at the state level, where a re-elected Governor Hochul and even larger Democratic legislative majorities will set the agenda. Priority workforce issues are likely to include childcare expansion, worker protections, artificial intelligence, and investments in economic development.

6. The Mamdani administration is now in the spotlight.

Mayor Mamdani’s political brand emerged stronger than ever from the midterms, as local candidates he supported racked up win after win and staunchly progressive Democrats won or outperformed expectations. With Mamdani’s gifts as a political strategist and communicator again confirmed, the focus will shift to his performance in office. As the Fiscal Year 2028 budget cycle begins, the mayor will face pressure to implement more of his affordability agenda and clarify his priorities on new issues such as education. Workforce development continues to offer potential to boost earning power, raise job quality, and find common ground with private-sector stakeholders—and, potentially, contrast with the gridlock that Washington, DC is likely to produce.

Created by Mayor Eric Adams in 2023 to implement New York City’s newly won authority to leverage its purchasing power by writing hiring requirements into City contracts, the Office of Community Hiring (OCH) was initially projected to connect an estimated 36,000 low-income New Yorkers per year to jobs and apprenticeships. Following a lengthy rulemaking process, the City began to register contracts with employment goals in spring 2025. Although OCH must issue quarterly reports on the total number, demographics, and compensation of hires, NYC’s performance on these measures has not been clear from what it has publicly shared. 

On October 27, the New York City Council’s Committee on Workforce Development held an oversight hearing focused on OCH to better understand the state of play. Council Member and Workforce Development Committee Chair Julie Won pushed Doug Lipari, OCH’s first Executive Director, who leads the Office of Talent and Workforce Development (NYC Talent), in which OCH sits, to discuss Community Hiring’s promise, its progress to date, and what it will take to deliver on its potential.

Lipari shared that the City has registered a total of 528 contracts worth $13.3 billion that include Community Hiring goals. These figures represent significant increases from the most recent quarterly report, which noted 179 contracts worth around $3 billion. He also noted that vendors on the 179 contracts have hired around 1,200 people—although roughly half of that total seems to have come from two contracts that overfilled their hiring goals. 

But the picture of who is finding work remains incomplete. He noted that hiring has reached all five boroughs and that “many are on public assistance,” but offered limited demographic information and no details on earnings.

Lipari and current OCH Executive Director Ji Lee also offered only broad explanations for why 75 of 83 registered construction contracts had reported no progress. It remained unclear how many of the previously announced 700 pre-apprenticeship positions had been filled. Across five contracts reporting progress toward an apprenticeship goal, apprentices from targeted communities logged no hours—a gap that warrants a clearer explanation.

Community Hiring remains in its early days, and the growth trend in covered contracts seems encouraging. As Lipari noted, many contracts play out over years, and hiring should pick up as the scope of work unfolds. NYCETC was an early voice supporting Community Hiring, dating back to the state-focused advocacy effort that helped pass legislation in 2023, and we remain committed to its success. 

But Tuesday’s hearing left a significant question unresolved: How well is Community Hiring reaching the people and communities it is intended to serve?

At Tuesday’s hearing, OCH described substantial work to launch Community Hiring. Lipari cited extensive engagement with external partners and City agencies before the rules took effect early last year, and Lee said outreach continues through procurement fairs and other vendor events.

But Council members’ questions highlighted why the reach of that outreach matters. Council Member Harvey Epstein pressed for specifics about the City’s partnerships on the Lower East Side, bringing the discussion to the neighborhood level. Council Member Phil Wong’s acknowledgment that he had not heard of Community Hiring made the challenge plain: people need to know the program exists—and where to connect—before its promise can become an opportunity.

Chair Won also pressed on whether OCH has the staffing needed to meet the program’s expectations. Officials expressed openness to additional support but offered little sense of urgency about securing it. That measured response is familiar from administration officials at oversight hearings, and it remains a concern: the administration’s staff needs to make a clear case for the resources their work requires. Identifying and securing that capacity is especially urgent if OCH is expected to help vendors navigate the program, connect them with workforce partners, and expand Community Hiring to major institutions such as Health + Hospitals and NYC Public Schools.

Most alarming is the lack of a clear accountability standard. OCH has not clarified, or at least has not shared, a standard or timetable for determining when a vendor has fallen short of its legal obligation to make “best efforts.” Program rules define those efforts as advertising openings, working with referral sources, maintaining regular contact with OCH, and retaining and training hires. They also provide a $2,500 penalty for noncompliance, plus an additional $1,000 per week for failing to take corrective action.

Asked how OCH determines whether a vendor has made “best efforts,” Lipari said the answer “will vary depending on the type of vendor doing the work,” describing it as “somewhat of a bespoke process.”

That approach presumably requires considerable staff time and close attention—making the office’s capacity especially consequential. Chair Won noted that OCH is budgeted for 16 staff members. Lipari and Lee reported that it currently has eight, plus two at the Department of Small Business Services. Although the officials and Chair Won differed on whether there are three or six vacancies, OCH acknowledged that it has no active job postings.

Community Hiring should be a top priority for the Mamdani administration. The program aligns with the Mayor’s stated commitments to use government power, in this case the City’s purchasing power through contracts, to serve everyday New Yorkers and ease the affordability crisis for low-income New Yorkers by connecting them to higher-quality jobs. Administration officials, including Lipari and Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su, who oversees NYC Talent, have characterized the workforce system as “essential public infrastructure.”  

Also frustrating is the City’s evident slow learning curve from a previous effort with a similar goal. Under Mayor Bill de Blasio, HireNYC required vendors with City contracts over certain thresholds to post related job openings with the City’s Workforce1 Career Center network and consider qualified candidates. A 2019 analysis from City Limits magazine found that more than 4,100 referrals were made under the program’s provisions. Of that number, 767 were hired, 31 were not hired, and the remaining 3,303—about 80 percent—were recorded as “pending.” It is unclear whether the City ever learned if those candidates were hired.

Community Hiring was intentionally designed to address the shortcomings of HireNYC. While the previous measure relied on mayoral policy and contract riders, Community Hiring is grounded in state law and the City Charter. It now requires quarterly reporting, whereas HireNYC had no public reporting requirement. It explicitly targets low-income residents in high-poverty communities, and includes financial penalties for failing to make “best efforts” to hire, which HireNYC lacked. 

But if disclosure is incomplete, and the tools to encourage compliance go unused, Community Hiring will likely fall far short of its potential. In his testimony following Lipari and Lee, NYCETC CEO Gregory J. Morris called on the City to take five steps to fulfill that promise: 

• Make accountability follow the worker. By tracking a jobseeker’s journey through the steps of Community Hiring, from referral to interview, offer, start date, and retention/advancement, we can better understand where the system is effective and where it needs reconsideration. Similarly, reporting should distinguish between newly hired workers under Community Hiring provisions and those recategorized from previous roles. 

• Give community organizations a funded role in program delivery. At the hearing, Lipari and Lee cited a referral network of 81 organizations, including 28 community-based groups. But NYCETC has a membership of 220 organizations, and Committee members Harvey Epstein and Phil Wong joined Chair Won in requesting greater engagement with their communities about Community Hiring opportunities. Sharing information about vacancies, required qualifications, wages, and hiring timelines, while funding organizations that refer candidates, can expand OCH’s reach and strengthen the program’s impact. 

• Make apprenticeship commitments real. Community Hiring should be a powerful vehicle for connecting low-income New Yorkers to apprenticeships, a proven path to career success. Public data showing zero apprentice hours across the five reporting contracts is alarming. OCH needs both why this is happening and what corrective actions it will take.

• Make the opportunity visible across industries. One way NYC’s Community Hiring initiative differs from programs elsewhere is its sectoral breadth: it covers not just construction but also human services, healthcare, and more. Greater transparency about what it takes to qualify for openings, including credentials and skills, as well as earnings and advancement pathways, will clarify the program’s performance and attract more candidates and organizational partners. 

• Make economic mobility an indicator of success. Job placement is not, and should not be understood as, the end of the story. Community Hiring reporting should include wages, benefits, hours worked, and six- and 12-month retention rates, as well as credentials earned and advancement over time. This analysis should include breakdowns by industry, demographics, and referral source. This will illuminate who is getting served and who isn’t, and inform what adjustments are needed. 

Community Hiring retains enormous potential to connect New Yorkers to jobs that provide economic security—and to make the Mamdani vision of government real through the everyday work of serving the public. Turnout at the newly opened NYC Jobs Center, and at hiring halls over the past year, suggests the interest is there. The City should champion what its dollars can do: put Community Hiring on signs at publicly funded projects, promote it in neighborhoods, and even give it a jingle. New Yorkers should know what their government is investing in—and how to get connected.

Fulfilling that promise will take more than the good intentions and diligence OCH has shown thus far. It requires the staff to support vendors, the partnerships to reach communities, and clear standards to hold contractors accountable. We encourage OCH to make the case for what it needs to grow and the City Council to keep the spotlight on whether that growth delivers for New Yorkers. We stand ready to help OCH connect with workforce partners, reach more New Yorkers, and make Community Hiring deliver on its promise.

Suggested Readings & Resources

• NYCETC Workforce Weekly, Community Hiring RFP; Security, Fire Safety Guards Sought, June 2024.
• amNewYork, Help wanted: City Hall’s ‘community hiring’ effort launched to add workers from lower-income communities, June 2024.
• NYCETC and The Office of Community Hiring, Community Hiring Information Session, January 2024.
• NYCETC Workforce Weekly, Community Hiring in Focus at Quarterly Workforce Development Board Meeting, September 2023.
• NYCETC Workforce Weekly, Community Hiring Legislation Passes, August 2023.
• Mayor Adams Announces Creation of Office of Community Hiring, Doug Lipari as Executive Director, July 2023.
• Community Hiring Legislation, May 2023
• Adams Administration, NYS Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic, and Asian Caucus, and Union Leaders Rally for Passage of Community Hiring Legislation, May 2023.
• Gotham Gazette, What is New York City Doing to Prepare Its Workforce for the Post-Pandemic Economy?, April 2021.
• Community Hiring Letter of Support, March 2021.

Regents exams have been part of New York high school education for nearly 150 years, but only in recent decades has passing them been required for every student to graduate. Beginning with the Class of 2028, that requirement goes away. Students will still sit for the state assessments federal law requires, but a score of 65 will no longer decide who graduates. 

Few are mourning the change, and for good reason. New York is one of a shrinking handful of states that still tie a diploma to exit exams, despite little evidence that doing so improves students’ performance in college or the labor market. As former First Deputy Chancellor Shael Polakow-Suransky recently wrote for Vital City, the global history Regents forces teachers to race through centuries of material, emphasizing memorization over the critical thinking and analytical skills students need beyond high school.

What replaces the Regents

After a multi-year review, the Board of Regents is joining a growing number of states that have embraced a new framework called Portrait of a Graduate (PoG). The shift will happen in phases: the Class of 2027 is the last that must pass Regents exams to graduate, while the fully redesigned, competency-based requirements will apply to a later cohort of incoming ninth graders. Classes in between will graduate under transitional rules.

PoG starts with the right question: What do young people need to succeed after high school? The state’s answer is six domains. Every graduate should be Academically Prepared, a Creative Innovator, a Critical Thinker, an Effective Communicator, a Global Citizen, and Reflective and Future-Focused.

From a workforce readiness perspective, this shift represents a real step forward beyond measuring achievement through five passing exam scores. Three domains align directly with the career readiness competencies defined by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE): critical thinking, communication, and career and self-development. Others connect more loosely but are no less vital for career success. Just as important, PoG creates space for new approaches to learning and new educational priorities. In a labor market where AI is reshaping entry-level white-collar work, technology fluency is not optional. Similarly, teamwork is hard to learn from a textbook. Both are best developed in real workplaces, alongside real colleagues, and while working toward real deadlines.

That is the throughline for our field. Career-connected learning is not an add-on to PoG. It is one of the main ways students will build and show the skills the PoG asks of them, and it is where PoG is thinnest on paper. Today’s ninth graders will enter a labor market shaped by AI, by shortages in care and the skilled trades, and by a higher education sector in flux. 

Can the NYC Department of Education deliver?

The vision is compelling. The question is execution. Skeptics worry the change will lower standards and leave NYC students less competitive. The honest response is that standards depend on how well competencies are defined and assessed, and that work has barely begun.

On September 22, the City Council’s Committee on Education held a hearing on DOE’s readiness. Chair Eric Dinowitz, a former DOE teacher, named the fear plainly: that the process would begin with “a well-meaning policy” and end with “a compliance checklist.”

New York City Public Schools (NYCPS), represented at the hearing by First Deputy Chancellor Danielle Giunta, argued that the city is not starting from scratch. The Office of Student Pathways (OSP) runs FutureReady NYC, which is now in more than a third of high schools. CareerReady SYEP, the school-based track of the Summer Youth Employment Program, reaches more than half of the city’s high schools. OSP Executive Director Jane Martinez Dowling reported that roughly 90,000 students annually take part in work-based learning, and Brooklyn South Superintendent Michael Prayor described the partnerships that schools in his district have built with employers including Cisco and Maimonides Hospital.

But reach is not the same as quality, and right now the City cannot publicly show either one. In NYCETC’s testimony, we walked the Committee through the Fiscal 2026 Mayor’s Management Report. Every Fiscal 2026 indicator under the two goals most closely aligned with the Portrait, postsecondary enrollment and access to career-preparatory coursework, is reported as “NA.” FutureReadyNYC is credited in the report’s narrative with generating more than $30 million in student earnings since Fiscal 2022, along with better attendance and GPAs, yet it appears nowhere in the performance indicators or the spending table. The MMR measures academic preparation a dozen ways while capturing none of the other five Portrait attributes. If PoG is the City’s standard for student success, the City should measure the whole Portrait, not just one-sixth of it.

The signal to watch

At last month’s hearing, Council Member Mercedes Narcisse asked how DOE is supporting curriculum redesign. First Deputy Chancellor Giunta responded that DOE is “not bringing in a new curriculum,” pointing instead to professional learning partners focused on pedagogy and delivery.

Schools have just absorbed new citywide reading and math curricula, and no one wants another overhaul so soon. But courses designed around passing Regents exams will require more than instructional adjustments to develop creative innovators and effective communicators. Without meaningful changes to how students learn and demonstrate their skills, we risk putting a new label on the same system.

Career-connected learning can help bridge that gap, but access to those opportunities cannot depend on which school a student attends or which employers that school happens to know.

Making the promise real

The State has set the destination. The City now has to build, fund, and measure the pathways that get every student there. That is what NYCETC asked the Council to push for in September:

1. Put FutureReadyNYC in the Fiscal 2027 Preliminary MMR. Track participating schools and students; offers, starts, and completions of paid work-based learning; hours worked and wages earned; credentials and college credits; and employer commitments. Disaggregate the results by borough, sector, and student subgroup.
2. Publish the path to every high school. Set a clear expansion timeline, annual targets for schools and students, and one authoritative measure of reach.
3. Give it a dedicated multi-year budget. Establish baseline City funding for FutureReadyNYC and report it separately from federal, State, philanthropic, and time-limited dollars, so the public can understand what sustains the program and where it is vulnerable.
4. Launch Commitment 100. Just as Vision Zero rallied agencies around one measurable goal, the City should commit to connecting every young adult to a quality job, paid work experience, or career pathway, with transparent targets and shared accountability.
5. Invest in the infrastructure for scale. Secure measurable employer commitments, fund a citywide intermediary strategy, and strengthen OSP so its Industry Commissions work as a real feedback loop between schools, employers, and students.

As co-chair of the Education and Human Services Commission, I am helping map career pathways and organize employer-led “Power Ups” that give students opportunities to explore careers and tackle real workplace challenges. Employers across sectors have an important role to play in creating these experiences, while NYCETC and our members can help demonstrate the skills students are developing and the value of these opportunities. We will bring that evidence to DOE, the Commissions, and the Council to help shift the focus from simply counting participation to measuring the quality and impact of career-connected learning. Making that shift will require educators, employers, and City leaders to work together, rethink familiar practices, and ensure these opportunities are available to students across the city.

The Portrait of a Graduate will not be measured by the standards New York adopts on paper, but by the opportunities students gain in practice. Delivering on that promise means ensuring every young New Yorker has the skills, experiences, and connections to succeed beyond high school.

This week, the New York City Council is asking some important questions about artificial intelligence: How do we make sure these technologies are safe? How do we create appropriate guardrails? And how do we understand and report on their impacts?

Those are important questions. But I want to add another one: What does AI safety mean for workers?

Because if we’re serious about protecting New Yorkers from the risks of AI, economic security has to be part of that conversation.

One of the proposals before the Council, Introduction 161, sponsored by Council Member Carmen De La Rosa, would require City agencies to report on how algorithmic tools are affecting the public workforce, including whether positions are being eliminated or workers displaced, how jobs and responsibilities are changing, and where workers need new training.

That matters. But identifying the impact is only the beginning.

For workers, the question isn’t simply whether AI is safe or whether we can measure its effects. It’s more immediate: What happens to me when this technology changes my job?

What happens to the entry-level worker whose foundational, first-rung tasks are increasingly automated? To the mid-career professional watching the skills that built their career shift in real time while being expected to work in fundamentally different ways? Or to the seasoned leader responsible for managing a workforce through changes they’re still learning to navigate?

We shouldn’t wait until workers lose their jobs to respond.

New York City has an opportunity to build worker-transition infrastructure alongside technological guardrails.

That means helping employers redesign jobs responsibly. Giving incumbent workers access to training before they’re displaced. Creating clear pathways into emerging and AI-enabled occupations. And making sure that when displacement does happen, workers have somewhere to turn for the support they need to navigate what comes next.

Our workforce development system has an essential role to play here. But that requires us to think differently about when we intervene. 

We cannot build a system that waits for someone to lose their job before deciding they need help. We need to get much better at intervening while the transition is still happening.

We don’t know exactly how AI will reshape New York City’s labor market. And we don’t need to pretend that we do. What we know is that work is already changing. And we have a choice about whether our systems change with it.

If New York City is serious about building guardrails for AI, we should be just as serious about building guardrails for workers. 

AI safety can’t just be about making the technology safer. AI safety has to include economic security.