RAISE US secures $500M backed by tech giants while the federal safety net for displaced workers sits empty
The companies that have attributed more than 50,000 American layoffs to artificial intelligence in the past year and a half have now committed more than $500 million to help the workers they displaced find new jobs -- and the structure of what they built may matter as much as the money.
On June 25, former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and former Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb launched RAISE US, a nonpartisan nonprofit with a mandate to retrain American workers for the AI economy. The coalition has already secured more than $500 million of its $1 billion multi-year goal. The names writing the first checks are, to put it plainly, the same names accelerating the disruption they say they want to fix.
The launch lands in an environment where more than 140,000 tech workers lost jobs in the first five months of 2026 alone -- a pace running roughly 33 percent above last year -- and where the only federal program that had been proven to help displaced workers bridge a wage gap lapsed in July 2022 and has never been reauthorized.
Who Is Backing RAISE US -- and Why That Matters...
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