Photo: Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images
Of all the destructive DOGE raids on federal agencies we’ve seen so far, perhaps the most predictable (with the possible exception of the virtual shuttering of USAID) is the abrupt dismantling of AmeriCorps, the assortment of national- and community-service programs operating under the umbrella of an independent agency. It’s happening as we speak, as Politico reports:
AmeriCorps placed employees at its Washington headquarters and around the nation on administrative leave Wednesday as the Trump administration and DOGE moved to make sweeping cuts at an organization that deploys volunteers across the U.S. …
Only a handful of senior officials and program heads remain active at the agency, one of the affected employees said.
Pretty clearly AmeriCorps staff read the writing on the wall even before DOGE struck, amid the gradual liquidation of its programs: “Nearly half of AmeriCorps’ 600-person workforce had already accepted the Trump administration’s deferred resignations and the agency earlier this week dismissed 1,500 young volunteers for the National Civilian Community Corps who provide disaster relief and other services around the country.”
While AmeriCorps has a pretty cool and famous brand, it’s really an unwieldy collection of programs that range from full-time to part-time to occasional community service, employing both youth and seniors, and functioning via partnerships with a vast number of private- and public-sector entities on a wide array of projects. The indistinct mission and polyglot organizational structure is a legacy of AmeriCorps’ original foundation in 1990 legislation setting up very different community-service models (legislation I was involved in drafting as a Senate staffer for national-service advocate Sam Nunn). The NCCC that was just closed down, for example, was a full-time residential program modeled on the New Deal–era Civilian Conservation Corps. The original AmeriCorps program (created with considerable fanfare in 1993 as a signature initiative of President Bill Clinton) represented a full-time non-residential model of youth service rewarded in part by post-service educational grants, reflecting a pale version of the G.I. Bill. Regardless of their origins and purposes, the various national- and community-service initiatives were placed under the AmeriCorps label in 2020.
AmeriCorps probably suffered as much as it benefited from Bill Clinton’s sponsorship. Once Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994, the program was a constant and regular target for Republican ire, reflecting as well longtime conservative hostility to any form of compensated service as opposed to unpaid “volunteerism.” It survived over the years with some crucial GOP support: John McCain was a regular advocate for a significantly larger and truly national service program, along the lines contemplated by Sam Nunn, and George W. Bush was grudgingly supportive. One reason for residual support for some form of national service across the ideological spectrum was the recognition that young people uninterested in military service had no obvious means of “giving back” to the country for its blessings. But despite some support for a larger and more focused program by Democratic presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, AmeriCorps never got the big push it needed to reach its potential scale as a major life option for young Americans and a non-bureaucratic means of delivering critical services from disaster relief to senior health care. Its complex organizational structure and immense network of partnerships has also made AmeriCorps difficult to manage efficiently. Congressional Republicans have made a lot of hay with the program’s poor audit record, which has made it easy to ignore the significant non-federal funds it has leveraged, not to mention the value of post-service educational benefits.
In any event, AmeriCorps was a sitting duck for DOGE, thanks to its partisan parentage, its scattered constituencies, and its do-gooder reputation. There’s some talk of the Trump administration rebuilding the program from scratch, but it’s more likely DOGE and OMB will pocket the savings from demolishing it and spend it on more favored causes like deporting immigrants or cutting taxes. For some of us who imagined that national service might become an important and ongoing part of American life and a source of patriotic pride, it’s a crying shame.
