208,705 workers filed for trade-displacement aid since 2022. The government certified zero.

Trade Adjustment Assistance was built in 1962 on a simple trade: the country gets cheaper imports, and workers who lose their jobs to that competition get training, income support, and relocation help to find something else.▸ Congress last renewed it in 2015, through the Trade Adjustment Assistance Reauthorization Act, and let a scaled-back "Reversion 2021" version run one more year after that. Then, on July 1, 2022, a termination clause written into the 2015 law itself took effect. Nobody voted to kill TAA. Congress simply let a sunset provision sunset, and the Department of Labor has been administering a dead program ever since — still taking petitions, never allowed to approve one.

TAA is funded by mandatory appropriation, and its five-year trend line is a cliff.▸ The Department of Labor's own FY2026 budget justification lays out the enacted history: $597.5 million in FY2021, still $509.2 million in FY2022 — the year termination actually took effect — and $466.2 million in FY2023, because the pipeline of workers certified before the cutoff was still large enough to spend real money serving. Then FY2024 arrived as the first full fiscal year with no new certifications feeding the program, and funding fell to $28.95 million — a 93.8% drop in a single year. FY2025 crept up slightly to $31.97 million after sequestration. For FY2026, DOL is requesting $50.3 million, explicitly framed as funding "under termination": enough to keep state agencies reporting and to finish paying out the workers still owed benefits from petitions certified before mid-2022, nothing more.

The department has asked Congress for more than a wind-down budget once before.▸ Its FY2025 budget request included a legislative proposal to restore the "Reversion 2021" version of TAA at $414.7 million — a nearly 14-fold increase over the $28.95 million wind-down level DOL was administering that year. Congress didn't enact it. The FY2025 appropriation that actually passed, in the full-year continuing resolution P.L. 119-4, funded TAA at $33.9 million before sequestration — the wind-down number, not the restoration.

The money collapsed because the department stopped being allowed to spend it on anyone new.▸ Under the termination provisions, DOL "ceased investigations of petitions filed for group eligibility and ceased issuance of certifications" the day the clause took effect — a freeze that has now run for four years. That didn't stop workers from filing. As of April 21, 2025, states, unions, and worker groups had submitted 1,272 petitions covering an estimated 208,705 workers since termination began, according to DOL's own FY2026 budget justification. Every one of those petitions sits uninvestigated. None have been certified, because the law no longer permits DOL to certify any.

The workers who did get served in FY2024 — 712 newly enrolled, "nearly 2,500" served in total — all came from worker groups DOL had certified before July 1, 2022.▸ They're the tail end of the old pipeline, not anyone newly laid off by trade in the last four years. DOL's own budget document adds a detail that undercuts any read of this as a program quietly fading out on schedule: "states are reporting more high-tech workers are seeking out TAA to reskill for careers in the US in new industries, such as infrastructure, climate aligned industries, artificial intelligence, health care, finance, and civic tech, but are unable to receive TAA assistance." The demand didn't stop. The agency's authority to answer it did.

All appropriation and workload figures are drawn from the Department of Labor's own enacted budget tables and the FY2026 Congressional Budget Justification narrative; the 208,705-worker petition count is DOL's estimate as of April 21, 2025 and has likely grown since, as the termination provisions remain in effect and petitions keep arriving.