The Response of the U.S. Public Workforce System to High Unemployment During the Great Recession

This paper is a part of the Urban Institute's Unemployment and Recovery Project, an initiative to assess unemployment's effect on individuals, families, and communities; gauge government policies' effectiveness; and recommend policy changes to boost job creation, improve workers' job prospects, and support out-of-work Americans. This paper discusses the Great Recession and the high unemployment that followed, as well as how the workforce system responded to challenges, its performance over the past five years, and the adequacy of its funding system. It concludes 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.