Project 2025's 'Skills Over Degrees' Push: A Trojan Horse for Deregulating Federal Contractors and Weakening Worker Protections

Project 2025 pitches its 'skills over degrees' agenda as a pro-worker reform: open federal contracting to workers without four-year degrees, remove arbitrary BA filters from private job ads, and shift workforce development to outcomes-based metrics. On paper, that sounds like an end to credential inflation. In practice, this is the same playbook that has already enabled mass misclassification of independent contractors, stripped workers of overtime and benefits, and let franchisors and staffing agencies evade joint-employer liability under the NLRA.

Take the core proposal: extend the civil service's skills-based hiring standards to federal contractors. Currently, federal contractors can require a BA for a job even if the worker doing the job doesn't need one. That's wasteful. But the solution Project 2025 proposes — a one-size-fits-all ban on BA requirements except where 'bona fide' — does not define what bona fide means, and it gives the Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy virtually unchecked authority to waive degree-based staffing requirements in existing contracts. That waiver power is a backdoor to allowing contractors to replace skilled, union-represented tradespeople with lower-wage, non-union labor, as long as they claim the workers have 'equivalent skills' without oversight from the Department of Labor. The same logic that opens jobs to non-degree holders also opens the door to misclassifying them as independent contractors, stripping them of minimum wage, overtime, unemployment insurance, and the right to organize.

Then there's the private-sector BA ban — a proposal that would require new legislation from Congress. Here Project 2025's own text admits an 'alternative view': that phase-down of federal tuition subsidies is a better way to address credential inflation. That internal dissent reveals the real agenda. A blanket ban on BA requirements doesn't just help workers without degrees — it eliminates a lawful screening tool employers use to ensure minimum competency, and it removes any incentive for employers to invest in training or apprenticeship programs. Meanwhile, the WIOA reauthorization vehicle would impose 'outcome-based metrics' on workforce programs — metrics that, without strong enforcement, can be gamed to reward placements into low-wage, non-union jobs with no career ladder. The $17 billion annual federal workforce budget would be redirected to programs that produce 'outcomes' defined by the administration, not by workers or their unions.

As of early 2026, none of these core proposals have been enacted. The skills-based hiring standard for federal contractors is not yet in force. The private-sector BA ban is still a legislative hill to climb. What has happened is the partial implementation of outcome-based metrics for workforce development programs — including through WIOA reauthorization in Congress — and internal DOL reviews. That is the fight now: ensuring that 'outcome-based' does not become a synonym for 'lowest-bidder, no-benefits, no-voice' job placement. The labor movement must demand that any workforce reform includes binding standards for job quality, union neutrality, and genuine career pathway construction — not just a checkbox on a grant report.