The Great Recession and the Workforce Investment System

A new Urban Institute paper is out by Stephen Wandner on the subject. Wandner was formerly a senior economist at DOL and has been a visiting fellow at the Urban Institute. I've spoken with him once or twice - always at the printer if I recall - and he's a nice and well informed guy.

From the summary:

"The Great Recession and the high unemployment that followed have been the public workforce system’s greatest challenge. How did the workforce system respond to these challenges? How has it performed over the past five years? How adequate has system funding been to serve the unemployed? This paper finds that that the American public policy response to the Great Recession was unbalanced and did not fully serve the immediate needs of unemployed workers by adequately funding reemployment and training services."