Federal Agencies Explore “Structured Presence Infrastructure” for Underemployed Adults

Washington, D.C. — The United States Departments of Labor and Education have jointly initiated a feasibility inquiry into what internal policy documents describe as Structured Presence Infrastructure (SPI): a network of federally supported facilities designed to provide adults aged eighteen to forty-five with daily schedule, monitored activity, and consistent environmental engagement during periods of underemployment, labor market transition, or what administrators have taken to calling “unstructured presence.”

The working concept, according to four individuals familiar with the planning process who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to describe it publicly as what it obviously is, is kindergarten. But for adults.

The inquiry, which officials stress remains in its early analytical phase, reflects what participating agencies describe as a structural misalignment between the conditions the American labor market can reliably supply and the conditions human beings appear to require in order to function in something approximating a normal manner. The facilities would not train participants for employment. They would not retrain participants for alternative employment. They would, in the language of the governing framework document, "simulate the experiential conditions of productive engagement" for individuals for whom productive engagement has become structurally unavailable.

Officials said the proposal has attracted interest from both agencies' senior leadership. A spokesperson for the Department of Labor declined to characterize the initiative as either hopeful or alarming, describing it instead as "responsive."

The Structural Diagnosis

The inquiry emerged from a joint working group convened in the third quarter of last year following the release of a Labor Department internal analysis titled "Presence, Participation, and the Dissolution of Occupational Identity in the Post-Automation Transition Period." The analysis, which circulated widely within the agency before being described in a congressional briefing as "a document we are not prepared to discuss at this time," argued that the primary social function of employment had never been economic. It had been temporal.

The document's central finding, summarized in a single sentence that has since been quoted in three separate internal memos across two federal agencies, read as follows:

"Employment once provided rhythm. That rhythm is now absent."

The analysis catalogued what it described as the secondary outputs of employment: predictable waking hours, social contact with non-family members, a sense of external accountability, access to physical spaces not one's residence, and what the document characterized as "behavioral scaffolding"—the network of small obligations, scheduled transitions, and legible expectations that organize a person's experience of a given day. In the working group's assessment, the ongoing erosion of full-time employment had not merely reduced household income. It had removed the scaffolding.

"What we are observing," said one working group participant, who agreed to speak generally about the inquiry's framing but would not be quoted by name, "is not primarily a financial crisis. It is a temporal one. People do not know what time it is, in the deepest sense. They have lost the external structure that told them."

The participant paused.

"The facilities would address that."

What the Facilities Would Provide

According to the framework document, SPI facilities would operate on a standardized daily schedule organized around what planners describe as "structured activity blocks." Attendance would be voluntary, though participating states may condition receipt of certain benefits on enrollment. The framework is careful not to describe enrollment as mandatory. It describes non-enrollment as a choice that "may carry administrative implications."

The proposed daily schedule, reproduced in the framework's appendix as a "representative operational model," includes the following components:

• Morning Arrival and Transition Period — Participants arrive between 8:00 and 9:00 a.m. Arrival is logged. A structured transition activity, which the document describes as "a low-stakes collaborative task requiring no prior knowledge or specialized skill," provides immediate engagement upon entry. Suggested formats include group puzzle assembly, communal plant care, and what the document calls "guided ambient conversation."
• Activity Block One — Scheduled group participation exercise. Emphasis on "cooperative rather than competitive engagement formats." Examples cited include organized walking, communal art production, and "civic awareness exercises," which the framework defines as structured discussion of general-interest topics "moderated to prevent unproductive conflict."
• Midday Rest Period — Designated nap period of forty-five minutes to one hour. The framework notes that rest infrastructure will require capital investment but argues that the cognitive and behavioral benefits of scheduled rest "substantially outweigh facility costs at population scale." Cots are mentioned. So are weighted blankets, described as "an evidence-based calming intervention" whose cost the document suggests may be offset through federal wellness appropriations.
• Activity Block Two — Facilitated skill or creativity engagement. The document is careful to distinguish this from job training. "The objective," it states, "is engagement, not qualification." Suggested formats include communal cooking, musical participation, introductory craft activities, and what one section of the appendix refers to, without apparent irony, as "guided singing sessions."
• Afternoon Transition and Departure — Participants depart between 3:00 and 4:00 p.m. Attendance is logged at exit. A brief "daily reflection" period precedes departure, described in the framework as an opportunity for participants to "verbalize one positive experience from the day." This component is listed as optional, though the document notes that facilities achieving higher reflection participation rates have demonstrated "improved next-day return rates" in pilot modeling.

The framework does not include evening programming. Officials, when asked about this, said the initiative is focused on the "core unstructured window," which their research has identified as the hours between approximately nine in the morning and three in the afternoon—the hours, that is, that employment used to fill.

The Nomenclature Question

The most extensive section of the framework document is not the operational model or the cost-benefit analysis. It is a fourteen-page section titled "Designation, Framing, and the Communication of Value," which addresses, with considerable care, the question of what to call the facilities.

The working group considered and rejected the following terms: Adult Day Programs (associated with elder care and perceived as stigmatizing for younger populations), Workforce Readiness Centers (implies job training the facilities will not provide, creating legal exposure), Community Engagement Hubs (tested poorly in focus groups, described by participants as "something from a brochure about a gym that closed"), and Behavioral Support Infrastructure (accurate but, in the working group's assessment, "not a name you put on a building").

The group landed on "Structured Presence Infrastructure," a designation that one working group member described as chosen specifically because "it conveys nothing alarming and almost nothing at all."

Individual facilities, the framework suggests, might be called "Engagement Centers" or "Daily Structure Facilities" or, in an option the document presents without recommending, "Community Rhythm Hubs." The framework notes that naming choices will be left to state-level implementation partners, with federal guidance recommending against any name that "implies a deficit on the part of participants" or "could be read as a description of what it is."

Dr. Henry Gutenberg, senior fellow at the Port-au-Prince Institute for Market Dysfunction and a longtime analyst of labor market adaptation failures, reviewed the framework's nomenclature section at this publication's request.

"The naming section is the most honest part of the document," Gutenberg said. "It is a fourteen-page acknowledgment that no accurate name for this thing is politically survivable. Which tells you something important about what the thing is."

Managing the Experience of Underemployment

The framework's most frequently quoted passage—the one that has circulated most widely among the policy analysts, labor economists, and congressional staff who have seen it—appears in a section titled "Program Objectives and Scope of Intervention." It reads:

"We are not solving underemployment directly. We are managing its experience."

The line was attributed, in the version of the document reviewed by this publication, to an unnamed senior advisor who offered it during a working group session as a "clarification of program scope." It has since been adopted as what one official described as "an internal shorthand for what we're doing and why."

The distinction between solving a problem and managing its experience is one that the framework treats as foundational rather than as a concession. The document argues that direct solutions to underemployment—large-scale employment creation, comprehensive retraining, structural reform of labor markets—fall outside the realistic operational capacity of a joint working group between two cabinet agencies operating under existing appropriations authority. What falls within that capacity, the document argues, is the provision of infrastructure for structured time.

"The question before us is not whether underemployment exists," the framework states. "The question is whether it can be undergone in conditions that preserve behavioral stability, social engagement, and what we are calling productive presence. We believe it can. We believe these facilities represent a meaningful contribution to that goal."

Gutenberg, when presented with this framing, said he found it coherent.

"The remarkable thing is that they're right," he said. "From a behavioral standpoint, a structured environment with scheduled activity, social contact, and a designated nap period would genuinely improve outcomes for the target population. This is not a fraudulent claim. The question they are declining to answer is why a society that can provide that infrastructure has not also found it possible to provide the employment those same people are there because they do not have."

He paused.

"The answer, presumably, is that cots are cheaper than wages."

Precedent and Comparables

The framework's comparative analysis section surveys existing precedent for what it calls "structured presence provision outside of formal employment." The programs reviewed include adult day health services (currently serving approximately 286,000 Americans, primarily elderly or disabled), day treatment programs in behavioral health settings, and what the document describes as "military garrison activity structures"—the scheduling frameworks that organize the daily lives of service members who are not actively deployed.

The framework also reviews international precedent, with particular attention to Japanese "Hello Work" centers, German Kurzarbeit (short-time work) arrangements, and what the document describes as "informal structured presence ecosystems" in several Northern European countries, which it characterizes as "cultural rather than programmatic, and therefore not directly replicable, but instructive as proof of concept."

The comparative analysis section also includes a brief review of what the document calls "historical domestic precedent," citing the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, and several Great Society-era community programs. The document notes that these programs are "not proposed as models" because they "included productive labor and wage compensation," which "fall outside the current proposal's scope and funding parameters." They are included, the document explains, as evidence that "federal provision of structured daily engagement for working-age adults is not without historical basis."

The section does not note that the historical precedents paid people.

The Singing Sessions

Among the framework's proposed activity formats, none has attracted more internal discussion—or, among those who have reviewed early drafts, more sustained private incredulity—than the guided singing sessions.

The framework proposes group singing as a recurring element of Activity Block Two programming, citing a body of public health and behavioral research supporting the cognitive and social benefits of communal vocal activity. The document's citations are accurate. Group singing has been documented to reduce cortisol levels, increase oxytocin production, improve mood, and enhance feelings of social connection and group cohesion. The framework cites twelve peer-reviewed studies. Several of them are quite good.

The framework recommends song selection that is "inclusive, non-partisan, and broadly familiar," with facilitated repertoire potentially including folk songs, popular songs from multiple decades, and what the document describes as "civic anthems with broad cross-demographic recognition." It suggests that facilities hire trained facilitators—it uses the word "facilitators"—to lead sessions. It notes that singing should be presented as "an optional component" while acknowledging that "group participation rates improve significantly when all participants are in the same room."

A legislative affairs official at the Department of Labor, reached by phone, declined to discuss the singing component specifically. "I would characterize it," she said, "as an evidence-based engagement tool." When asked whether she had personally reviewed the literature on group singing, she said she had. When asked whether she believed it would work, she said she did. When asked whether she had told anyone outside the agency that she works on a program that includes adult group singing, she said the call had been very helpful and thanked this reporter for her time.

The Question of Productivity

One of the more structurally unusual features of the Structured Presence Infrastructure framework is its treatment of productivity—or more precisely, its explicit refusal to claim it.

Most federal workforce programs are organized around an output: a job obtained, a credential earned, a skill acquired, an income restored. The output is what justifies the investment. The SPI framework does not propose an output of this kind. Its proposed metrics are attendance rates, daily return rates, self-reported wellbeing scores, and what it calls "behavioral stability indicators"— measurements of whether participants' daily routines remain consistent over time. The framework proposes that facilities report these metrics quarterly to a joint oversight body.

It does not propose measuring employment outcomes. The document explains this choice in a brief paragraph that reads, in its entirety:

"Employment outcomes are not a primary program objective. Facilities are not designed or resourced to function as employment pathways. Measuring employment outcomes would therefore assess the program against a criterion it does not claim to meet, creating evaluation frameworks misaligned with program design. Facilities should be evaluated on what they provide: daily structure, monitored engagement, and productive presence."

"Productive presence," the document clarifies in a footnote, "refers to the state of being consistently and engagedly occupied, regardless of whether that occupation generates economic value or advances occupational preparation."

Gutenberg, who has spent three decades studying what he calls "the gap between what institutions are designed to accomplish and what they are designed to appear to accomplish," described this as "the most transparent thing I have read in a federal document in recent memory."

"They have simply removed the pretense," he said. "Every workforce program in the last forty years has claimed to produce employment. Most of them don't, not at scale, not for the populations they serve. The innovation here is that they've stopped claiming it. They're saying: we will give these people somewhere to be. That's it. That's the program. In a way, it's a kind of honesty."

He reviewed the document for another moment.

"A depressing kind."

The Public Reaction, Such As It Is

News of the inquiry became public through a report in a trade publication covering federal workforce policy, which described the SPI framework in terms that were largely clinical and received, in the first twenty-four hours, minimal attention. The story was then excerpted, without additional context, in a general-interest newsletter under the headline "The Government Wants to Put You in Adult Daycare," and subsequently acquired the character of a public event.

The reaction divided along lines that officials said they had anticipated, if not entirely welcomed.

A portion of respondents—concentrated, according to polling conducted by a nonpartisan research organization in the days following initial coverage, among individuals who described themselves as employed full-time—characterized the proposal as an insult. "I worked for thirty years so my tax dollars could pay for nap time," wrote one commenter whose observation was subsequently quoted in four separate opinion pieces, none of which noted that the program would also include nap time for him, should he ever need it. Critics in this category tended to describe the initiative as evidence of government overreach, cultural decay, or what one syndicated columnist called "the comprehensive infantilization of a generation that was simply not told to try harder."

A different portion of respondents—concentrated among individuals who described themselves as underemployed, gig-dependent, or in some form of transitional labor status—characterized the proposal as adaptive, stabilizing, and, in a word that appeared repeatedly in the comment sections reviewed for this article, "relatable." Several respondents who fell into this category noted that they had already constructed informal versions of the proposed infrastructure in their own lives: libraries visited daily for the environmental consistency, coffee shops inhabited for hours for the ambient human contact, coworking spaces subscribed to at significant personal expense not for the internet access but for somewhere to be. One respondent wrote, without apparent humor, that she had been running her own pilot program for three years.

A smaller number of respondents responded to the proposal with a question. The question was repeated across comment sections, letters to editors, and a congressional inquiry letter submitted by seventeen members of the House Education and Workforce Committee, who asked the Departments of Labor and Education to clarify their response to the following:

"Are we building systems for work, or for waiting?"

The Departments have not yet responded to the letter.

The Labor Market Context

The SPI inquiry did not emerge in a vacuum. It emerged from a labor market that has, over the past fifteen years, undergone a set of structural shifts whose combined effect on the daily temporal organization of working-age adults has received less attention than their income effects, largely because income is easier to measure and waiting rooms do not file tax returns.

Gig and contract employment, which now accounts for a substantial and growing share of total labor market participation, does not provide a fixed schedule. It provides availability windows. Workers in gig arrangements do not arrive at a place at a time and stay until another time. They are available, which is a different relationship to the day. Remote work, which expanded dramatically during the pandemic period and has partially but not fully retracted, removed the physical displacement that employment traditionally provided—the act of going somewhere, being there, and coming home, which organized the day into legible zones. Part-time employment, which has grown as a share of total employment, provides less schedule than full-time employment by definition, often in configurations—four hours on a Tuesday, six hours on a Thursday—that structure some of the week while leaving the remainder in an ambiguous relationship to time.

The framework document synthesizes this landscape in a section titled "The Rhythm Gap," which argues that the combination of these trends has produced a population of adults who are, in varying degrees, underanchored: not unemployed in the formal sense, not employed in the traditional sense, present in the labor market in ways that do not generate the temporal infrastructure that labor market participation was historically understood to provide.

"They have somewhere to be, sometimes," the framework notes. "They do not have somewhere to be, consistently, in a way that organizes the rest of their time around it."

The proposal, in this reading, is not an alternative to employment. It is an acknowledgment that employment, as a mechanism for temporal organization, is no longer universally available. The facilities are an infrastructure for the gap.

The Childhood Comparison and Its Implications

The framework document does not use the word "kindergarten." It does not use the phrase "adult daycare." It does not, in any of its one hundred and twelve pages, describe itself as a program for individuals who require the same temporal management infrastructure that American society provides for children aged four and five. The working group was aware, the document's introduction notes, that "framing choices carry significant implications for participant perception and program uptake," and made its naming and framing decisions accordingly.

Nevertheless, the comparison is difficult to avoid, and several of the analysts, policy researchers, and congressional staffers who agreed to speak with this publication for background purposes made it unprompted.

"The structure is kindergarten," said one analyst who works on federal workforce programs and reviewed the SPI framework at a colleague's request. "Scheduled arrival. Activity blocks. Nap time. Group singing. Monitored engagement. Low-stakes collaborative tasks. The only thing missing is a cubbied coat hook and a form that asks your emergency contact."

The analyst noted that this was not, in itself, a criticism.

"Kindergarten works," she said. "Children who attend kindergarten demonstrate measurably better outcomes across a range of developmental and social metrics than children who do not. The structure is not the problem. The problem is the implication."

The implication, which she did not spell out but which several other individuals interviewed for this article offered versions of, is this: the SPI framework treats the absence of self-generated structure among underemployed adults not as a symptom of systemic failure but as a condition to be managed. The infrastructure it proposes is the infrastructure of childhood: external, imposed, benevolent, and predicated on the assumption that the individuals being structured cannot, or will not, structure themselves.

Whether that assumption is accurate is a question the framework does not address.

Whether addressing it would change the proposal is a question several people asked but nobody answered.

Gutenberg's Assessment

Dr. Gutenberg, who has studied institutional responses to labor market disruption since the early 1990s and who described the SPI framework as "the most coherent articulation of a certain kind of surrender I have encountered in a policy document," offered the following analysis of the proposal's underlying logic:

"The framework is built on a correct observation: that employment provides things beyond income, and that those things—temporal structure, social contact, behavioral scaffolding, a sense of location in the world—are not automatically replaced when employment is withdrawn. That is a real problem, and it is under-studied and under-addressed in mainstream labor policy."

"The framework's proposed solution is to provide a substitute for those things that is not employment. To build facilities that give people somewhere to be during the hours when employed people are at work, so that underemployed people have—in the framework's language—productive presence."

"What the framework does not do is ask why the society that can fund these facilities cannot also fund the conditions that would make them unnecessary. That question is notably absent. It is absent in the same way that the word 'kindergarten' is absent: deliberately, carefully, with full awareness of what would happen if it were present."

Gutenberg set down the document.

"The facilities will probably help," he said. "Cots and singing and scheduled walking are not nothing. For people who are genuinely unmoored by the loss of occupational rhythm, they are probably something. The question is whether 'something' is sufficient, and whether a society that builds facilities for waiting is still a society that intends to solve the problem that makes waiting necessary."

He said he did not know the answer.

"I am not optimistic," he added. "But I have weighted blankets in high regard."

The Funding Question

The SPI framework's cost projections, included in a technical appendix that was not made available to this publication but was described by two individuals who had reviewed it, estimate per-participant annual costs in the range of seven thousand to eleven thousand dollars, depending on facility size, staffing model, and geographic location. For context, the federal government currently spends approximately sixteen thousand dollars per year on each student enrolled in the federal student loan system, approximately twelve thousand dollars per incarcerated individual in federal facilities, and approximately eight thousand dollars per capita on Medicaid.

The framework proposes funding through a combination of existing Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act appropriations, discretionary Labor Department programming funds, and, in states that choose to participate, Medicaid waiver authority under behavioral health provisions—this last option contingent on a legal determination that "occupational disengagement" constitutes a covered condition under applicable statute, a question that the framework describes as "promising but not yet resolved."

One senior Labor Department official, speaking generally about the funding landscape, said that the initiative had been "designed to exist within current appropriations flexibility" and that "no new legislative authority is anticipated to be required for initial implementation." When asked what "initial implementation" meant, the official said it meant pilot facilities. When asked how many pilots, the official said that had not yet been determined. When asked in which states, the official said those conversations were ongoing. When asked when they might conclude, the official said the inquiry was in early stages and that officials were exploring all options.

At Press Time

The inquiry remains in early stages. The framework document is under review. Pilot parameters have not been finalized. State interest has been described by officials as "substantial but preliminary." No facilities have been built, no cots purchased, no facilitators hired, no singing scheduled.

Adults aged eighteen to forty-five who are underemployed, gig-dependent, or navigating the irregular geography of part-time labor continue to navigate irregular schedules, undefined roles, and unstructured time. They are doing so, for the most part, independently: in apartments, in libraries, in coffee shops where the WiFi password is written on a chalkboard and the chairs are not designed for long-term occupancy, in coworking spaces rented by the hour, in cars between gig assignments, in the intermediate spaces where the working day used to be.

They are managing the experience of underemployment without federal infrastructure. Several of them, reached for this article, said they were managing fine.

Several others said they could use a nap.

Editor's note: The Port-au-Prince Institute for Market Dysfunction has no position on adult napping, regarding it as neither a market distortion nor a market correction but simply a thing that has always happened and will continue to happen regardless of federal guidance. Dr. Gutenberg naps daily between one and two-fifteen. He does not require a cot. He has his own. This is noted for transparency.