Tongue Point Job Corps Center

The Department of Labor Office of Job Corps, a civilian sub-agency within the Department of Labor, administers the Job Corps program, which provides education, training, and support services to economically disadvantaged young adults through a nationwide network of residential and non-residential centers.

Job Corps operates a minimal contract footprint relative to its mission scale. Since 2009, the Office has awarded six prime contracts totaling $374.4 million in combined potential value, with $277.6 million obligated to date (74% of potential). Recent activity is sparse: one award in 2015, one in 2020, one in 2021, one in 2023, and one in 2024. Among the last five years of awards, Reid Middleton, Inc. and Citrine-Olsson JV LLC each received one contract, with combined potential values of $417 thousand and $504 thousand respectively. The competitive landscape is highly fragmented — three distinct prime contractors have won across the entire portfolio history, and the top two by recent-award count account for 100 percent of awards in the last five years but carry minimal individual contract values, suggesting the agency's largest awards may predate recent activity or remain concentrated among earlier primes. Two-thirds of awards carry no set-aside designation; one-third are small-business set-asides.

The Office's contract activity does not appear to reflect the scale of the Job Corps program itself, which operates dozens of centers and serves tens of thousands of participants annually. The sparse, low-value contracting pattern suggests that operational funding and service delivery at Job Corps centers flow through grant mechanisms, workforce-development funding streams, or operational budgets housed elsewhere in the Department of Labor rather than through competitive prime contracting. Firms pursuing Job Corps work should investigate whether relevant opportunities are catalogued under parent-agency (Department of Labor) contracting actions or funded through non-procurement channels such as cooperative agreements or interagency transfers.