FOX NEWS, Opinion – May 5, 2025
DOGE helps gut the leftist lunacy at this most pious agency
by James Bovard,
Agency’s own Inspector General blamed it for a ‘shocking waste of taxpayer funds, lax oversight’
AmeriCorps is proof that if “we hold hands and believe … we can change anything we want to change,” President Bill Clinton declared in 1999. But after more than 30 years of fraud, false claims and political racketeering, AmeriCorps – the federal paid volunteer oxymoron – just got hit by a DOGE torpedo.
“AmeriCorps has failed eight consecutive audits and is entrusted with over $1 billion in taxpayer dollars every year,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly declared. The agency’s Office of Inspector General condemned it in 2014 for “shocking waste of taxpayer funds, lax oversight, unauthorized contractual commitments and widespread noncompliance with rules, regulations and sound contracting practices.”
Things have only gotten worse since then. DOGE froze $400 million in grants to more than a thousand organizations, terminating more than 30,000 AmeriCorps members. Most AmeriCorps staffers have either quit or were placed on paid leave.
AmeriCorps is a ripe DOGE target because its motto seems to be: “Leave No Boondoggle Behind.” In Missouri, AmeriCorps members released 70 blue balloons outside a county courthouse to draw attention to the plight of abused children.
Hundreds of Playworks AmeriCorps members served as elementary school “recess referees,” bringing “safe and inclusive play to all students.” AmeriCorps members in the Florida “Women in Distress” program organized a poetry reading on the evils of domestic violence.
Federal agencies are prohibited from bankrolling political advocacy, but that doesn’t stop AmeriCorps. AmeriCorps aided and abetted ACORN, the Welfare Rights Organizing Coalition, the Political Asylum Project of Austin, the National Association of HUD Tenants and Planned Parenthood. AmeriCorps members have busied themselves passing out free condoms and providing escort services for women going to abortion clinics.
I have chronicled AmeriCorps’ debacles over the decades in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Playboy, and American Spectator. After Clinton bragged that AmeriCorps members had taught millions of kids how to read, I visited one of their premier literacy programs in West Virginia. AmeriCorps members emphatically denied teaching kids how to read – instead, they said they were simply exposing children to books.
In Mississippi, I attended the opening of an AmeriCorps assistant teacher training program where recruits were only required to read at an 8th grade level. (The program’s grant application was chock-full of grammar and spelling errors.)
According to AmeriCorps, “national service returns up to $17 for every federal dollar invested” in AmeriCorps. The formula event counts the stipends paid to AmeriCorps recruits – as if they would otherwise never get a paying job elsewhere. The tortured assumptions used to gin up the $17/$1 multiplier can’t be squared with having no clear idea where federal funds actually go.
I saw this first-hand in 1999 when I visited a premier AmeriCorps program which received $600,000 to recruit people for food stamps. After the executive director of that Mississippi program evaded my questions, I alerted the Inspector General. Turns out that AmeriCorps money was spent on 14 ghost employees (including a local mayor) who did nothing for the program. The chief of that local agency was convicted and sentenced to 41 months in prison.
AmeriCorps still struggles to distinguish between real and imaginary “service.” During the first Trump administration, the Inspector General warned of pervasive fraud involving “teleservice” — AmeriCorps members phoning in claims of the good deeds they supposedly did. Many grantees made no effort to verify the purported hours served. AmeriCorps management responded by recommending “immediate contact between the member and individuals to whom services are rendered.”
This is AmeriCorps’ definition of “close enough for government work” altruism. The Government Accountability Office slammed AmeriCorps for failing to “demonstrate results” and ignoring “the quality of service provided” by its members.
AmeriCorps apologists perpetually portray AmeriCorps recruits as financial martyrs. Pennsylvania Democrat Rep. Chrissy Houlahan boasts of her time with AmeriCorps, declaring, “It’s a selfless act to serve, but you are gaining experience, and you are able to parlay that into opportunities in the civilian economy.” But she was part of the Teach for America program whose AmeriCorps recruits were paid up to $80,000 a year plus benefits.
Most AmeriCorps members receive far less, but the overall package of stipends, fringe benefits and education awards exceed the wages collected by millions of Americans at the bottom of the pay scale. Being an AmeriCorps member is easier than making fries at McDonald’s.
Olga Rodriguez lamented on the Huffington Post that serving in AmeriCorps was destroying her work ethic. AmeriCorps member Nicole Patterson, who received a Congressional Bronze Medal for Community Service, vented: “I spent six weeks playing Scrabble and kickball for America. I spent another two months sitting in a tool shed for America.”
Democrats and liberals are seeking to ignite panic over the demise of AmeriCorps, but did these apologists fail arithmetic long ago? AmeriCorps had roughly 75,000 paid members before the DOGE purge. According to the Census Bureau, 75 million Americans formally volunteer with organizations each year. AmeriCorps amounts to barely one tenth of one percent of the total number of volunteers in this country.
More than 20 states filed a lawsuit on April 29, challenging the Trump administration’s AmeriCorps cutbacks. According to Fox News, “AmeriCorps is expected to remain in existence, but essentially will be restarted from scratch.” But there is no way to redeem a program that boasts of its balloon launches, poetry readings and condom giveaways.
Congress and the Trump administration should admit that AmeriCorps will never be more than social work tinged with messianic delusions. There are a thousand times as many private volunteers who will assure that AmeriCorps members will not be missed. Taxpayers can no longer afford AmeriCorps’ endless virtue signaling.
Jim Bovard is the author of 12 books, including “Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty.” He has written for The New York Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Playboy. voluntee
James, I respectfully feel you are misrepresenting AmeriCorps in this article. You have cherry-picked some situations to express a point of view you are already inclined to believe. The dates you cite are more than 10 years old and more than 25.
I work for a state commission that oversees the federal dollars you say are being misused, and that could not be farther from the truth. My job is to make sure each and every penny is spent within the regulations. Which includes speaking with each program director, their accountants, and their lawyers. My state audits each program monthly to ensure their compliance.
Our members on average receive a living allowance of about $18,500 a year (plus a small college/trade school award) which is roughly the pay for flipping burgers. That you would rather have them do, instead of say teaching kids to read or doing disaster relief.