{"id":21586,"date":"2025-05-05T07:31:48","date_gmt":"2025-05-05T11:31:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=21586"},"modified":"2025-05-05T07:31:48","modified_gmt":"2025-05-05T11:31:48","slug":"fox-news-opinion-doge-helps-gut-the-leftist-lunacy-at-this-most-pious-agency-americorps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/05\/fox-news-opinion-doge-helps-gut-the-leftist-lunacy-at-this-most-pious-agency-americorps\/","title":{"rendered":"Fox News: Opinion DOGE helps gut the leftist lunacy at this most pious agency AmeriCorps"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>FOX NEWS, <\/span>Opinion – May 5, 2025<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

DOGE helps gut the leftist lunacy at this most pious agency<\/a><\/h1>\n

by James Bovard,<\/p>\n

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Agency’s own Inspector General blamed it for a ‘shocking waste of taxpayer funds, lax oversight’<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
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AmeriCorps is proof that if “we hold hands and believe … we can change anything we want to change,” President Bill Clinton declared in 1999.<\/a> But after more than 30 years of fraud, false claims and political racketeering, AmeriCorps \u2013 the federal paid volunteer oxymoron – just got hit by a DOGE torpedo.<\/p>\n

“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\u2019s 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.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

AmeriCorps is a ripe DOGE target because its motto seems to be: “Leave No Boondoggle Behind.”<\/strong> In Missouri, AmeriCorps members released 70 blue balloons<\/a> outside a county courthouse to draw attention to the plight of abused children.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Federal agencies are prohibited<\/a> from bankrolling political advocacy, but that doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

I have chronicled AmeriCorps\u2019 debacles over the decades in The Wall Street Journal<\/a>, 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 \u2013<\/a> instead, they said they were simply exposing children to books.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s grant application was chock-full of grammar and spelling errors.)<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 as if they would otherwise never get a paying job elsewhere. The tortured assumptions used to gin up the $17\/$1 multiplier can\u2019t be squared with having no clear idea where federal funds actually go.<\/p>\n