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Good afternoon, Ranking Member Scott, and members of the Committee. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today about why the federal adult education program belongs in the U.S. Department of Education (ED) and why the illegal interagency agreement that moved the program to the U.S. Department of Labor is so harmful.����

My name is Braden Goetz, and I am a senior policy advisor in the Center on Education & Labor at the nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank �鶹������ý. Before �鶹������ý, I worked for 26 years at ED, primarily in the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education, or OCTAE.�� I speak to you primarily from that experience and perspective.��

in 1964 because it recognized that millions of people in the U.S. needed a high school diploma, strong foundational skills, and English proficiency to build better lives. That need continues. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, ages 25 and over—nearly 23.8 million people—lack a high school diploma or its equivalent.��

Adult education is the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act’s (WIOA’s) largest program, last year. are in English language instruction programs, 30 percent are in programs for learners with skills below the 9th grade level, and 20 percent are in high school equivalency programs. School districts comprise 47 percent of , and another 30 percent are institutions of higher education. In , the program is run by the state K–12 or a higher education agency. Adult education is, at its core, an education program.

Congress made clear in WIOA that you expected close collaboration across ED and DOL�� in implementing the law, and policy-making leaders and career staff delivered. Cross-functional teams with representatives of each program met frequently to share information, plan, and make decisions together. Program leaders met monthly, for example, while the team working on measuring performance met every week. We wrote joint regulations and guidance together, and traded drafts of program guidance for feedback. DOL gave us access to labor market information; we worked with the Institute of Education Sciences to create a website with state and county-level estimates of adult literacy and numeracy proficiency to support planning by workforce boards. Collaboration can always be deepened, of course, but we worked as one team. We did not need to sit in the same agency to do that.����

That coordination and the insights we gained from DOL were useful, but to be successful in helping students achieve their goals, adult education needs the deep expertise in education that only a home in ED can provide. Our program staff brought extensive education backgrounds of their own, but the wisdom and experience of colleagues elsewhere in ED made adult education stronger still. For example:

• When we designed teacher professional development to improve reading instruction, we consulted experts in scientifically-based reading instruction from other ED offices that had created similar projects.����
• When we helped states build content standards for adult education, we turned to K–12 standards experts in the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education.��
• Colleagues working on the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and the Rehabilitation Act in the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services helped us get smarter about serving students with disabilities.��
• TRIO staff from the Office of Postsecondary Education contributed expertise on college access strategies to help us strengthen pathways from adult education to higher education.��
• We collaborated with the Office of Educational Technology on strategies for building digital literacy and with the Office of English Language Acquisition on improving instruction for young adult English learners.��

The expertise flowed both ways. Our team helped implement the ability-to-benefit provisions of the Higher Education Act that let students without high school credentials to access federal student aid. We provided support for the Pell Prison Education program, and promoted awareness of the opportunity among correctional educators. We also offered our professional development programs to Migrant Education High School Equivalency program grantees.

We’d have been lost if we were in DOL. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) classifies federal employees who have teaching experience or other expertise in education as “education program specialists.” Even after last year’s massive layoffs, ED still had 168 education program specialists on board in May 2026, according to data on OPM’s website. Out of 11,029 employees, . As an agency, DOL just doesn’t have the institutional know-how needed to run education programs.

The OCTAE IAA has been disastrous for adult education. ED and DOL stopped creating professional development and technical assistance resources for adult educators and shifted most of the money available for these activities into the challenge that is promoting state “talent marketplaces.”¹ The technical assistance and monitoring teams . States that used to look to ED for help with professional development and program design and improvement now have no one to call. Two different program directors have left under the arrangement.������

The students in adult education classrooms need us to get this right. They’re taking time away from work and their families because they want a better life. To make those minutes count, to help them achieve their goals, we must ensure their teachers have the support of an agency of experts in education, not one improvising its way through an unfamiliar mission.

The illegal IAA must end.