Although the Employment Service is only one of 19 required partners in the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) One-Stop delivery system, its central mission—to facilitate the match between individuals seeking work and employers seeking workers—makes it critical to the functioning of the workforce development system under WIOA.

[2] To this end, one of the key functions played by the ES is to deliver many of the "career services" established by WIOA.

In 1933 during the Great Depression, with the Wagner-Peyser Act, the 2nd USES was reinstated “to set minimum standards, develop uniform administrative and statistical procedures, publish employment information, and promote a system of "clearing labor" between states.”[5] Then President Franklin D. Roosevelt had created many government-funded work projects to help boost the economy and the USES was responsible for hiring the workers on those projects.

[6] Like many labor organizations of its time, the USES officially stated a belief in racial equality in the workplace, yet it provided fewer jobs for its African American workers.

Historian Eric Arnesen from the University of Illinois argues that, “although the agency stated its general opposition to racial discrimination, it referred very few African Americans to jobs in war industries, defense training courses, or youth work-defense projects.

[4] It was transferred from BES to War Manpower Commission (WMC) in the Office for Emergency Management by EO 9247, September 17, 1942.

USTES' employment service components were reconstituted in Manpower Administration as the 3d USES, with the status of an autonomous programmatic unit.