Remember how President Obama in his day used to natter on about "summer jobs for youth"? It was kind of a touchstone, a shibboleth, to him; the government program that would solve everything. Obama couldn't stop himself.

Ever since Tom Wolfe wrote about "summer jobs for youth" in "Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers," most of us have known there was something skeezy about it.

But now DOGE has gone digging, and the waste, fraud, and abuse found there is even more disgusting than previously thought.

According to Luke Rosiak at the Daily Wire:

A Labor Department program designed to train 16- to 24-year-olds to join the workforce spends more per person annually than Ivy League colleges, but participants wind up making minimum wage on average — raising questions about whether it should continue to exist.

The Job Corps pays teenage runaways, high school dropouts, and twentysomething ex-cons to live in dormitories and receive their GEDs and vocational training. The national cost per graduate was $188,000, with the average graduate staying 13.5 months. Of more than 110 campuses, the 10 least efficient averaged a cost of $385,000 per graduate. Job Corps participants earn $16,695 per year on average after leaving the program, according to new government data.

Nearly $2 billion in federal taxpayer money is spent annually on residential Job Corps campuses, a boon for the for-profit contractors who run them. But the dismal statistics about the program’s efficacy have never been fully public until the Trump administration released a “Transparency Report” last week.

So it's a fair guess that whoever goes into this program probably has dimmer job prospects than those like them who go through no programs at all. It sounds like jail programs have better results than these.

Obviously, this is one for DOGE to zero out for good, it's nothing but an NGO-wealth creation machine that comes at the expense of those in its charge. If a program can't produce halfway decent results for its basic, minimal, task of 'helping' the indigent, and actually does the contrary, then it needs to be scrapped.

In the era of imperial judges, that probably won't happen, but it should. It does call to mind that government training effort results are absolutely abysmal.

Back in the aughts, when the big battles over free trade were being fought, Obama argued for "worker retraining" as a condition of passage of trade pacts and constantly moved the goalposts in a bid to get these worker-retraining, or "trade adjustment assistance" programs paying their NGOs in the name of "helping" trade-displaced workers.

The results were exactly the same.

Back in the 2000s, when I wrote for the editorial page at Investor's Business Daily, I found these old editorials I wrote, describing just how bad these results were:

A Labor Department study on the effectiveness of Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), a $1.3 billion program for workers who claim their jobs were lost to foreign competition, has not only missed its deadline by four years, but is also being withheld until the end of the year, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Based on how this White House operates, it's virtually certain they're hiding the results. Other studies show the TAA program to be a big failure. But President Obama wants Congress to pass it as a condition for his submitting the U.S. free trade treaty with South Korea to Congress for a vote. As ex-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said: "You have to pass the bill to find out what's in it."

... and ...

For starters, TAA is wasteful. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., released a report earlier this year showing that the $18 billion the government already spends on job training programs are full of waste, fraud and abuse.

A 2008 American University study by Kara Reynolds and John Palatucci concluded the same, declaring TAA "of dubious value in terms of helping displaced workers find new, well-paying employment opportunities."

Meanwhile, a 2003 study from the Office of Management and Budget called TAA downright "ineffective."

Also, it duplicates other programs. Trade-blogger David Almasi cites a GAO report earlier this year that shows, as of 2009, there were already 47 different federal jobs programs administered by nine different federal agencies. And 44 of those duplicated other efforts.

Finally, it cheats workers. The GAO study found that workers in the TAA program made less money in their new jobs than workers who hadn't benefited from the 156-week program.

A Heritage Foundation study of academic papers also found that TAA training tends not to boost wages.

Sound like this youth program? It does to me.

I also found a knock-on bad effect from the TAA training that is worth considering in light of this program's existence:

"Very few people become unemployed because of import competition," notes Cato trade economist Sallie James. "A study by labor economist James Sherk found that only about 1% of unemployment can be attributed to competition from international trade."

But because workers who can claim their job losses are due to imports get special benefits, a perverse incentive is created to blame all job losses on trade.

"Unions and other anti-trade zealots gleefully use TAA data to make the case that trade causes outsourcing and job loss," Hatch noted last week. "In the end TAA really is just a government subsidy for anti-trade propaganda."

Might that be the case with these Job Corps jobs, too? Perhaps they serve as an incentive to oppose hard work or constructive engagement in the economy. There are so many unintended consequences and perverse incentives embedded in them.

That tells us the Job Corps -- and all its NGO cash-cow pork shoveling -- has got to go. It's been a long time coming and one can only hope its demise will make it a little-known and unmissed historic pecularity.

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