“I asked students at Brown University a few weeks ago: "How many of you are worried about getting a job?" Every hand went up.
Brown is an elite institution with historically strong career pathways. Yet even there students are losing confidence. When I asked why, the answer was unanimous: artificial intelligence.
Companies like Meta, Amazon and Oracle are cutting roles even as profits grow. A recent Stanford study, "Canaries in the Coal Mine," found that young workers in the most AI-exposed occupations saw a 16% relative decline in employment from late 2022 through September 2025.
Joblessness in your 20s reduces lifetime earnings, narrows your prospects, carries mental-health risks and weakens your sense of purpose. This isn't only a labor-market disruption. It's a generational emergency.
We have missed such warnings before. In the 1980s, William Julius Wilson sounded the alarm on job loss hollowing out black communities. In 2015, economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton documented deaths of despair in working-class America.
Anthropic's Dario Amodei has warned of massive job loss across technology, finance, law and consulting, with unemployment surging as high as 20%. The risks go beyond white-collar work; manufacturing and other sectors also face pressures.
We need the boldest jobs agenda in generations. I call it Work for America. Work for America is inspired by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration. Employing more than 8.5 million people, WPA built bridges, roads, public buildings, parks and airports, while supporting artists, writers and musicians whose work helped define American culture.
Critics called it a boondoggle, but WPA got millions of Americans back to work. It boosted America's recovery from the Great Depression while creating physical and cultural infrastructure we still rely on today.
During the Depression, our nation experienced a total collapse in demand, not a massive technological change. But again the private market is failing to absorb willing workers. And the cost will be disproportionately borne by entry-level workers doing repetitive tasks.
Work for America would provide one million living-wage jobs for up to three years across a range of occupations at an estimated cost of $62 billion annually, which is less than 1% of the federal budget. Open to all ages, it would attract young people and function like a national-service program. It would begin not in stages but at scale to match the emergency, with the capacity to grow if displacement gets worse. Participants would develop skills to work in the private and nonprofit sectors.
Work for America would rebuild the ranks of public service -- not only in Washington, but among the teachers, social workers, public-health workers, and local government staff who make our communities function. A new generation of civil servants can overhaul websites, cut through red tape and improve agency collaboration.
Young people can serve in their own communities or far from home, building connections across social divides. As a young lawyer, my formative experiences were in Biloxi, Miss., representing families who lost their homes to Hurricane Katrina. As a young federal employee, my economic ideas were shaped by visiting shuttered mills in Youngstown, Ohio.
Work for America will recruit Americans for moon-shot projects on renewable energy, cancer research, AI ethics and quantum computing. During World War II, FDR recruited William Knudsen, president of General Motors, to help mobilize American industry. Work for America will build similar partnerships, funding the hiring and training of people in key sectors, doing work the private market isn't doing, in places it hasn't reached.
I have established pilot programs with companies like Google and Zoom that demonstrate how these partnerships can work. Companies can join with community colleges, historically black colleges and local institutions to train workers for high-paying AI-era jobs using AI tools. Work for America would fund these programs nationally.
Labor and vocational training will be crucial. Creating programs with unions, Work for America would establish 1,000 new trade schools across the country. To ensure that those pathways lead to jobs, it would encourage federal contractors to develop apprenticeship programs.
The companies driving the AI revolution are generating enormous wealth. A modest tax on billionaires and a token tax on AI use will more than suffice to finance Work for America.
Walt Whitman wrote that he heard America singing in the carols of mechanics, carpenters, and shoemakers building our country. That chorus has grown quiet in recent decades, muted by offshoring, automation and economic dislocation.
Work for America would help us hear it again, loud and hopeful, from a generation determined to build our country anew.
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Mr. Khanna, a Democrat, represents California's 17th Congressional District.” [1]
1. WPA Meets AI in My Work for America Proposal. Khanna, Ro. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 15 May 2026: A15
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