At 16, Autumn Rose was homeless. Then, in January 2025, she enrolled in the Seamanship program at the Tongue Point Job Corps Center campus in Astoria, Oregon, and her life abruptly changed for the better. (At her request, The Nation is not using her full name.) She had food, shelter, medical care. She had a goal and the training and support she needed to achieve it.

Or at least she did until Donald Trump’s secretary of labor, Lori Chavez DeRemer, announced on May 29 a shutdown of Job Corps programs across the nation. With more than 300 other at-risk students ages 16-24, Rose was told she’d have eight days to exit the campus. She has nowhere to go but back on the streets. “I don’t want to do that particularly,” she said, in a glum adolescent understatement.

Rose’s story is wearily familiar to an American public that’s seen the Trump administration careen from one callous and cruel shutdown operation to another on a near-daily basis, from the suspension of cancer research grants at the National Institutes of Health to the abrupt cutoff of foreign-aid lifelines and PEPFAR funding. Yet this program termination is targeting young workers-in-training like Rose in the struggling rural communities that have furnished robust grassroots support for Trump and the MAGA movement over the past decade.

Astoria, where the Tongue Point facility helped prepare people to work for area shipping and fishery companies as well as in service jobs, sits at the mouth of the Columbia River near the Pacific Ocean. It’s perhaps best known now as a mecca for superfans of the 1980s comic-horror movie Goonies, which was filmed there—at this month’s Goonie Fest, cult followers of the 1980s movie will see the town’s population of 10,000 double. But Astoria is also an old coastal working-class town that once harbored Finnish socialist labor organizers—along with the KKK, which ran the city for a short time in the 1920s. Tongue Point, a former naval base on the city’s outskirts, became Astoria’s Job Corps facility not long after Lyndon Johnson signed the bill creating the program in 1964; it supplied housing as well as job training for young people enrolled there.

Sixty years later, Tongue Point Job Corps continues to thrive, with 150 staff serving 313 students learning 12 skilled trades. The program’s goal of training workers for American jobs seems tailor-made for Trump’s many campaign pledges to protect American jobs in US-backed industries. Yet Tongue Point, along with 98 other Job Corps facilities across the country, is just another casualty in the Trump White House’s crusade to carry out the government-slashing agenda of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for the second Trump administration. Technically, the Department of Labor is calling the Job Corps shutdown a “pause,” to create the appearance of sober and dispassionate review of the program’s mission and success. But as we’ve seen at scores of other federal agencies, the real agenda here is to kill off key services and government operations before the affected communities can mount any opposition.

Across the country, shell-shocked Job Corps students were told they had to leave campus on June 6—just eight days after the Labor Department’s directive. At Tongue Point, union-aligned trade instructors departed immediately. Students who had somewhere to go began leaving—including some on track to graduate in August. With a June 30 deadline to shutter the entire facility, panicked staff living on campus scrambled to find housing in a town where there’s an acute shortage.

Current Issue

July/August 2025 Issue

In the department’s official announcement, Chavez-DeRemer asserted the Labor Department’s commitment to transitioning Job Corps participants and providing whatever resources they need to succeed. None of that is actually happening. “We are navigating in the dark,” says a staffer from Tongue Point’s Career Technical Training division.

Labor Department officials jumped in to chastise Tongue Point’s director Mac McGoldrick for granting a media interview on the shutdown. They also issued a directive to code student paperwork as “Administrative Separation with Reinstatement”—a placement category that theoretically makes it possible for departed students to return—while directing staff to inform students that they have no such option. When the students don’t come back, the numbers will connote that they had the choice but refused it, skewing data to suggest that the program wasn’t actually working—a classic nihilist-conservative assault on government services, as chronicled in Thomas Frank’s 2008 book The Wrecking Crew.

As with other Trumpist drive-by assaults on agencies and programs, the case for shuttering Job Corps campuses rests largely on fabricated data. According to the National Job Corps Association, the Department of Labor’s 2025 “Transparency Report” used to justify the shutdown is riddled with incorrect data and misleading assumptions. Alarming statistics involving “safety incidents” come from required reporting of such trivialities as students’ being late to class and using profanity. In calculating the average salaries of graduates, the report averages in zero dollars for those who go on to college, enlist in the military, or simply fail to complete the survey, dragging the overall earning figures down significantly.

These bogus findings—together with cherry-picked figures from older and dubiously relevant reports—have fanned out from the White House into Fox News segments and two-minute hates on social media. Yet, here again, MAGA propagandists are taking direct and sadistic aim at the movement’s base. This program works,” said David Reid, executive director of the Astoria-Warrenton Chamber of Commerce. “It’s a huge return on investment for this county.” In public testimony, McGoldrick has noted that the program sees immediate results for most students inside of a year, with graduates bringing in an average starting salary of $45,000 after a $42,000 annual outlay for their training at Tongue Point.

A sign on the road leading to the Tongue point campus features a quote from Thomas Jefferson: “The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.” But destruction is now the order of the day. “We haven’t slept. We are grieving. We are mourning,” said deputy director Jessica Ericta. Ericta is a Job Corps graduate herself—as were four of her siblings from the economically precarious home she grew up in. “It saved our lives,” she said.

In chambers packed with staff, students, and community members, Astoria’s City Council listened to story after story documenting the effects of the shutdown. Dental program student Jenna Cole traveled a thousand miles to enroll at Tongue Point. “I don’t think it’s fair that the government has done this to us,” she said, fighting tears. “We need this. This is our life. This is our future.”

Medical assistant student Leah Johnston shared the same sense of alarm and betrayal. “I am stranded,” she said. “I know so many other people that are in the same boat as me.”

Mike Sasso, director of the Seamanship program where Autumn Rose is enrolled, was visibly angry. “I am the most patriotic person you will ever meet,” he said. But with the shutdown, he added, “I have never been so sad about our government.”

Residential adviser Taylor Ford spoke of watching a student sell his belongings as he prepared to become homeless. “We’re throwing them to the streets and taking away the promise we’ve given them,” she said.

Dazed and demoralized Job Corps defenders are still fighting to help their students—and to lay the groundwork for reversing the administration’s cruel and senseless decision. Three days before the eviction deadline, the Labor Department gave students an additional week to launch themselves into the unknown. A day after that, Judge Andrew L. Carter of the Southern District of New York issued a temporary restraining order in a lawsuit that—surprise, surprise—contends that Trump lacks the authority to shut down the congressionally mandated program. On June 17, Clark will consider whether to issue a permanent injunction.

By now, the routine is all too familiar: injunction followed by appeals, followed by court orders the administration may or may not follow. Meanwhile, despite the injunctions of Thomas Jefferson, lives are being changed, and not for the better.