Thought Piece

This is the kind of reporting that has been missing in the mainstream media. It shows the costs and benefits of a federally funded program: “A private and public partnership.” While the promises sound plausible and even high-minded, the results prove again that the private sector create real jobs and the public sector programs create a few millionaires, with almost no benefit to the communities the program was designed to help.

This is like a broken record, politics over economics, with a few photo opportunities and no results. When will a few brave souls start reporting on unsexy, but infinitely more important, results of the federal government and its agencies programs. Where are the 60 Minutes and 20/20’s exposes when America needs them? Steve

P.S. Historically, the public sector has never been known to know how to commercialize anything.

Underreported: What Happened When Government Tried to Fix a Coal Town

PAINTSVILLE, Ky.—When Ben Larrabee heard about a new government-funded job training program for the digital age that promised to turn “coal country” into “code country,” he stopped looking for other jobs.

“The thing that got 800-plus people to apply and go through the process was that it promised jobs that would run from $30,000 to $40,000 a year,” Larrabee told The Daily Signal.

The program, a product of President Barack Obama’s TechHire Initiative of 2015, was so popular it earned its own segment on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.”

But what “The Daily Show” failed to mention is that the program produced such underwhelming results, government officials ended their multimillion-dollar contract with Interapt, the software company hired to administer the TechHire Eastern Kentucky initiative, known as TEKY.

Despite this, Louisville, Kentucky-based Interapt is off in places as far as Buffalo, Wyoming, soliciting more taxpayer dollars to replicate the program.

“Sometimes when you’re promised something, you may be being lied to,” Paintsville Mayor Bill Runyon warned.

For our latest episode of “Underreported,” The Daily Signal traveled to this small town in Eastern Kentucky to learn the truth about this government-funded job training program. Watch the video report above, and read more about the program here.