If you’ve seen any coverage of politics in the United States, over the last, say, 15 years, you’ve probably heard the phrase: America is divided. Sometimes we’re “hopelessly” divided; other times, we’re “bitterly” divided but no one looks at what we’re living through right now as normal times, so much so that the idea of an American Civil War, part deaux, once unthinkable, is slowly creeping its way into the American psyche.
When we started becoming this divided has been debated ad nauseum: the failed supreme court nomination of Robert Bork, the failed impeachment of Bill Clinton, 9/11 and its twin wars: Iraq and Afghanistan, the Great Recession, or the election of Donald Trump. Take your pick – a book has been written about how this moment was somehow different than moments that came before it and this moment was THE MOMENT THAT EVERYTHING CHANGED. 
Obviously, there is no one thing that can cause such a schism in political consciousness – the electorate is comprised of hundreds of millions of people, all of whom hold a plethora of (often times conflicting) beliefs and values, so a single culprit is not going to ever be identified, because no single cause exists. 
That’s not the point of this essay. If you want to learn how any of the preceding events added to the general feelings of mistrust and anger that Americans hold against both their government and the crazies or deplorables on the other side, there are countless books, tv shows, videos, and podcasts for you to consume. Today’s topic stems from the malaise but is not about the malaise itself. 
Various proposals have been put forward on how best to heal this divide, how best to bring people of increasingly segregated worlds together in order to form, if not love, at least enough respect and tolerance to do the common work of making the country a better place for many, if not, all.
This essay is about whether a mandatory national service program is that solution. 
In a 2017 Times Magazine article entitled Every American Should Serve For One Year, retired Army General Stanley McChrystal calls for a “million opportunities each year for young Americans to spend a service year with peers who are different from them”. To accomplish this goal, he suggests that we increase the number of AmeriCorps positions from roughly 250,000 per year to 1,000,000. The late John McCain co-sponsored a bill entitled 21st Century Conservation Service Corps that would enable the National Park Service and US Forest Service to employ young people and veterans in partnership with Non-Government Organizations. Steve Cohen, writing in an article for the US Naval Institute entitled The Need for a Mandatory National Service Program, warns, “We are divided, mistrustful, angry, and probably far more fearful than we want to admit.” Cohen’s article should be singled out for its thoroughness – the author lays out his argument for mandatory service in a Q & A format, predicting ten questions his audience is likely to have for this idea and answering each in turn. I’ve cribbed this format for this essay but, in order to keep my thoughts independent from his, I did not read past the introduction and very much look forward to after writing this essay – It will be interesting to see our common ground and where our thoughts diverge.
Each of these, as well as essays by David Brooks and others, call for an expansion of national service, though each of them differ in what exactly that service would entail. 
To provide a framework for this essay, when I say national service, I am referring to programs like Peace Corps, Teach for America, AmeriCorps, or military service, either in the National Guard or as an active-duty member of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, or Marine Corps.
Of the above list, Teach For America and AmeriCorps are the least well known to the general public. 
Teach for America selects high achieving college graduates to commit to teaching at least 2 years in high need schools across the country. Since the founding of the program in the late 1980s, there have been roughly 50,000 participants who have gone through this program.
AmeriCorps, which falls under the Corporation of National and Community Service, is an umbrella term for a series of programs where paid volunteers partner with service organizations and NGOs to help communities in need. Projects can range from doing tax work for low-income rural or inner-city citizens to building houses with Habitat for Humanity. Forest Corps, which will begin in the summer of 2024, is an expansion of the AmeriCorps program and is part of President Biden’s American Climate Corps. This program is designed to combat climate change by doing forest work with the Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service. 
I was a corps member and team leader in AmeriCorps NCCC, one of these umbrella programs. To give you a sense of scale, there are roughly 1,000 people each year who actively service in AmeriCorps NCCC, a program that caters to adults under 30 who choose to serve a ten-month, team-based, service term. 
As a caveat, my experience as an AmeriCorps member will undoubtedly bias my opinion so I want to make sure that I have made that abundantly clear – I enjoyed my service immensely; it shaped many of my beliefs, both in myself and the world at large. I have to set that aside, however, when thinking about the totality, good and bad, of a mandatory service program. 
For the sake of brevity, I will refer to this hypothetical mandatory service program as the Year of Service or YoS throughout the remainder of this essay. I will refer to those actively serving in the program as participants. 
Now, let’s lay the groundwork of what this program would look like. The first question (and possibly most important) is what do we mean when we say ‘mandatory’ service? A mandatory program, unlike a voluntary one, introduces several questions that would need to be worked through in order for the program to be successful in the eyes of the public. I will go through a few of these questions below but they are by no means exhaustive. A realistic (if ambitious) goal would be to expect 90% of citizens to serve in this program. 
With that in mind, here are some likely questions that would arise from the creation of the YoS program.
* Who is required to serve in this mandatory program? 
In my hypothetical YoS program, every person who is over the age of 18 would be required to, at some point before their 24th birthday, serve a single 12-month term of service. Those who are serving or who have served in the military or Peace Corps or AmeriCorps, are exempt. I would also consider exempting anyone serving a broader national good but would limit this exemption to a relatively short list of occupations, mostly teachers, firefighters, police officers, and medical professionals. I’m open to further arguments here but would, as a rule of thumb, try to limit the exemptions as much as possible in order to head off accusations of favoritism for any one group or sector of people. If there are certain religious objections to serve, I would also allow for an exemption for these. 



* Would there be a physical fitness requirement?
In order to maximize the number of eligible participants and because, quite frankly, having a physical requirement would possibly put the program in competition with military recruitment, it’s best to not have a physical requirement. When designing how best to allocate human capital in order to meet the dual goals of the program (more on that below), there would need to be some assessment in order to match a person’s individual skillset and interest with vacancies. 
A permanent deferment should be granted to those individuals who are determined by a physician to not be emotionally or mentally capable of serving in a team-based capacity. In order to not create a two-tiered program, I would not consider a separate branch of eligible service for those unable to meet these requirements.  
* Would there be a high school equivalency requirement?
No. Unlike the military or AmeriCorps (which requires the completion of a GED before the end of one’s service year), there should not be an educational requirement to serve. Having no educational requirement would serve the stated goal of bringing a broader cross section of Americans together whom would normally not be together. We know from the concept of assortive mating that people tend to gravitate towards people that remind them of themselves. These advantages (and disadvantages) propagate themselves generationally. Granting access to social capital at an early stage in one’s life may mitigate some of the downsides of assortive mating in society, writ large.
While I don’t think an educational requirement is valid, I do think having something akin to the ASVAB is key to appeasing fears that this is simply a “make work program”. All participants will be required to take a YoS equivalent of the ASVAB (the YoSAT – the Year of Service Aptitude Test) to place them in areas where their skills can best be utilized. 
* Would there be an English-language requirement? 
Similar to my logic for not requiring a high school equivalency, having mixed language teams will benefit those who often feel excluded and build tolerance among those who have never had the experience of not being able to be understood. Some accommodations should be made so that there are no teams that contain a single member who speaks a non-English language. 
* Would single parents or familial caregivers be exempt? 
No, though admittingly, there would have to be some kind of childcare or caregiver apparatus in place in order for this to have public approval. I am not well versed in the military’s position on these issues to have a recommendation based on current practices but would look there for guidance as to a policy position.
* If spouses choose to serve at the same time, would they be given any consideration for serving together? 
I believe the best way to achieve the multiple goals of the program is for participants to serve in teams or squads, to use the military term. In AmeriCorps NCCC, the teams typically range from 8 to 12 people. A squad is roughly the same size. Having spouses serve on the same squad, while beneficial for that couple, would work against the goals of the program. Consideration would be given for geographical location, however, allowing for downtime to be spent together. 
* What work would be done?
4 categories – Education, Environment, Healthcare, and Housing – should make up the bulk of the projects. 
In addition, natural disaster support should be added in times of emergencies. 
I believe these four categories encompass areas where public investment would do the most good for the most people – this is a utilitarian argument which would also, hopefully, allow the program to have relatively high public support, should it come under attack (more on that later).
* What would be the penalty for refusing to serve?
This may be the hardest question to answer. One of the goals of the YoS is to bring people from different backgrounds into the same physical space where they otherwise would not be, at least not as peers. The impulse, then, is to make the penalty for not serving severe. However, if the penalty is a monetary fine, this fine will inevitably harm poor people more than those with means. So…what are the alternatives? Jail seems extreme. A sentence of mandatory community service for skipping mandatory national service doesn’t make any sense. I don’t like any of these options but would probably lean towards something that doesn’t restrict someone’s freedoms and doesn’t give them a criminal record but something that is such a hassle that there would be a real penalty for deciding not to serve. 
A mandatory weekly in-person meeting with a probation officer for 2 years would be my solution to this.   
I don’t believe that many people would fall into this category due to the relatively high benefits of the program but, recognizing that people, in general, don’t like being told what to do and that people, in specific, hate when the federal government tells them what to do, a pool of funding would be needed to pay for probation officers to perform this function. 
If someone repeatedly does not meet with their probation officer, I would recommend similar penalties to draft dodging.  
* Would felons be required to serve?
Yes, as long as they were non – violent felons. I think individuals with violent felonies should be excluded from the program. Given the relatively young age of the participants, this would alleviate parental fears that their children were in close proximity to violent offenders. Another way of saying this is, should someone with a violent felony participate in the program and harm another participant, no matter the circumstances, it would be a PR disaster that the program would do well to avoid. 
* And finally, what would the average experience of a participant look like?
Participants would work around 45-50 hours a week, with the downtime being their own. They’d be paid something on the order of $20-$25 / hour, which, while not a fantastically high salary, would be considered pretty good given the fact that transportation, healthcare, and meals are covered. In addition, there would be a significant education award, which those who are planning on attending college could use to further their education. This award could also be used for those with student loans.
The program would, in many ways, resemble AmeriCorps NCCC. When Stanley McChrystal wrote about increasing the 250,000 AmeriCorps members per year, he was referring to the program as a whole. This includes programs like Senior Corps and AmeriCorps State / VISTA. I won’t go down the rabbit hole of the differences between these programs but will explain very briefly why AmeriCorps NCCC should be the model to base the YoS on. 
AmeriCorps NCCC starts with induction and training before members are placed on teams and then set on rounds of service, typically 4 in a ten-month service term. Each team is led by a team leader, typically someone in the age range of the participants serving. 
There is a focus on service learning, or understanding, by interacting with a specific community, why the social problem or issue exists in the community that one is serving. 
It’s a residential program, where members live and work with the same group of people for the entire service term. Each team is expected to share a van for transportation. They are given a food budget where meals are expected to be consumed communally. This creates a bond between team members that, I can speak from experience, goes far beyond the ten-month service term. 
These values all dovetail with the goals of a YoS and would serve as a model to build upon. I believe that, to make YoS as effective as possible, that YoS participants should receive additional training and, unlike AmeriCorps NCCC, should be working the same projects for the entirety of their service term – ie. If you are working an educational project, that will be the only project you work the entire service term. This approach has downsides but will allow for competency to grow over time and make the participant more effective at their task then if they were switching projects every couple of months.
Before we look at the feasibility of this program, let’s here from our sponsor.
Now that we’ve covered the contours of the program, let’s look at how to calculate whether or not this would be, overall, beneficial to the American people. 
A standard methodology used to determine if taxpayer money is well-served is a cost-benefit analysis. 
One of the biggest questions when looking at any cost benefit analysis is “how much is this going to cost”? Like all hypotheticals, this is a tough, if not impossible, question to answer accurately. Let’s compare the YoS to other government programs. The Department of Defense has roughly 1.2 M active service members. The DoD budget for 2024 is about $900B. That’s 750K for every service member. Obviously, a huge part of that number is related to military equipment, housing, and other overhead. Around 25% seems to be the average for the amount militaries pay to soldiers as wages and wage equivalents. This means that about 225B of the 900B goes to pay, bringing our number down to roughly $187,500 per person; we’ll use this as a ceiling for what we are going to spend per participant for the YoS. A program like AmeriCorps NCCC is relatively equipment and benefit light with the cost being about 35K per Corps Member. We’ll use that as a floor.
Assuming the cost of equipment, housing, services, and training will need to be higher than AmeriCorps but lower than the miliary, let’s settle on a cost of $100,000 per year per member of the YoS. This $100,000 would include a salary, health benefits while serving, and an education award at the end of the service year. AmeriCorps members currently receive an education award valued at roughly $600 for each month they serve which can be used to pay for tuition or student loans. In order to make this program attractive, this would be tripled for the YoS. 
About 3 million people graduate from high school each year. Assuming that 90% of high school grads would at some point serve in the YoS, the cost would be $270B per year. 
This is analogous to 10X what we spend on NASA. Other than Defense, this would be the most spent on any discretionary spending category. To put it bluntly, the program would cost a lot of money. 
I will write more about the political ramifications and likelihood of this program later in the essay. For now, let’s focus on the benefits of the program to society at large. 
A note – what I’m about to say are platonic ideals and, like all institutions with flesh and blood people, the platonic ideal will never be realized fully. It’s important, however, to state these goals, if for no other reason then to aspire to their lofty heights.
The benefits are 1). in an increasingly polarized climate, where many Americans feel isolated from a larger sense of community and purpose, the YoS could serve as a reminder, albeit it a relatively brief one, that good, kind, and hard-working people come from all walks of life and that cooperation, even on very difficult problems, is not only possible but preferable. This increase in tolerance for others would strengthen political and social institutions, lower divisiveness, and lead to a government and business culture that responds more to the needs of the people, writ large. 
2). The value of the work that is being done – for example, if a million trees are planted, what are the environmental, social, and economic benefits in the reduction of air pollution? If one million children are taught reading comprehension, and it increases the high school graduation rate, what are the economic benefits long term?
A third, if something of a mixed category, is the economic benefit of a greater social cohesion, brought on by the program. If you believe that the dissolution of social bonds could lead, at worst, to a second civil war, the cost of which would likely be trillions of dollars, the program could then be also seen as having a risk reduction function, lowering the likelihood of catastrophic losses. 
I’m not an actuarial scientist, so I would not have the skills nor knowledge of the best way to evaluate this program on a cost-benefit analysis thoroughly. Even if I did have those skills, it’s nearly impossible to know A). How effective the program would be at achieving these goals and B). The nature of the work done – ie. The program would not exist in a vacuum and work that may be of a high social and economic value may be performed by either public or private actors by the time the YoS gets up and running. It should also be clearly stated that much of the benefit of the work done by the YoS as I envision it would not be recognized or realized for decades (see the example above on increasing high school graduation rates).
Now, let’s look at the political side of the coin. 
Given the price tag, something like the following scenario would have to happen in order for Congress to appropriate funds to this program:  
Over the course of a second Trump administration, China takes an increasingly hostile stance towards Taiwan. Nikki Haley comes into office with a small majority of both Houses of Congress. In a giant spending bill, the DoD budget is increased substantially. The military, realizing that an increase in military funding without an increase in the number of soldiers serving, pushes for a mandatory national service bill. 
Why? There is a gap between those who have served in the military having had an immediate family member serve and the general public having had an immediate family member serve. Another way of saying this is that people serving in the military are more likely to come from a family where someone has served. 
A military that is concerned with increasing recruitment would look at this as an opportunity to find alternatives to bringing future recruits into the fold. A YoS is an obvious pipeline towards military service.
In a 2023 episode of The Why it Matters Podcast, entitled Army of Some, one of the guests calls for the need to “bridge the civil – military divide”. One way he identifies is to expand national service programs which he says “tend to break down social divisions”.
Even with this support from the armed services, the high cost of the program would, almost from the start, cause ire to fiscal hawks, both Democrats (who would see the program as an ineffective use of funds when compared to higher priority needs such as increasing access to quality health care and education) and Republicans (who feel that the private sector would be more effective at any work that would yield economic benefit). 
The YoS would also suffer from having a dual purpose – most institutions that do (k12 education, prisons) tend to come under severe scrutiny when it is perceived that one of these purposes is being neglected in favor of another. The criminal justice reform movement can be seen as a backlash against the believe that the carceral state is primarily focused on removing offenders from larger society and punishing them without regard to their social development and future reintegration with society at large. The military, which focuses solely on defending the country abroad, does not suffer from this issue to nearly the same degree. 
The details of the program and how they are sold to the public would matter immensely here – is the program sold as a way for young Americans to overcome differences and misunderstandings? Is it a way to fight the high cost of college? How are the benefits of social cohesion sold to the American people? Is the YoS a way to complete projects that may not be considered vital to the public interest but, among experts, considered very important (lead pipe and paint removal being an example)? Who decides which of these projects are prioritized? Given the size of the expenditure, would it require a Congressional oversight committee?
These are all vital questions that would need to be answered and answered to the satisfaction of those who would see the YoS as a huge line item at a time where federal budgets will have to, unless income taxes rise rapidly, be trimmed. 
It's also important to note that those in favor of expanded national service programs are almost always institutionalists (and older ones at that) – those who have benefitted from the current economic and political climate of the last 40 or so years. Would this program be seen differently by younger generations, those who have shared less in the prosperity of the country, who often have a dimmer view of America? This also remains an open question. 
If you’re hearing this and have a sense of despair, another way to look at the problem is this: if not this program – because it’s too big, because it would be ineffectual for the money spent, because people value their individualism too greatly – then what is the best way to heal these divisions at a broad scale?
A “skinny” program, ala McChrystal’s proposal, runs into many of the same problems as the larger program – it’s a target for those who want to kill it and it doesn’t achieve the broader goal to the same degree – 1,000,000 people isn’t 3 million. Also, as noted before, AmeriCorps NCCC is the only residential program and the non-residential programs, in my opinion, don’t succeed to the same degree at bringing people from diverse backgrounds together on an intimate level; building homes with Habitat for Humanity for a year is a wonderful way to spend one’s time – it doesn’t necessarily facilitate broader tolerance and goodwill towards others that living and working with ten strangers for a year would. 
Another solution - we could go upstream. Leaders of both political parties have bemoaned the lack of civic education, especially at the high school level. If the bill for the YoS is considered too high, then maybe increasing funding for teaching government and ethics in k-12 schools is a cheaper alternative. 
However, we run into problems here as well. K-12 education is in a place of flux (which I’ll expand upon in a future podcast). There are around 100,000 public schools in the country. Each one is controlled at the local level. It is difficult, if not impossible, to get consensus on anything. For example, Common Core was introduced nearly 15 years ago. There have been rollbacks and attempted rollbacks in several states. 
The roadblocks to building national cohesion through k-12 education are several: A curriculum would have to be created and adopted on a broad level. It would have to survive parent and teacher criticism. It would almost certainly get swept up in curriculum wars, by those who feel it detracts from the more practical subjects, more practical subjects that their children will be tested on.
In his book Addicted to Reform, former education reporter and teacher John Merrow calls for a paradigm shift in the goals of k-12 education; he sees the need for a re-orientation of curriculum from constant testing and evaluation to a focus on building healthy and productive citizens. Something similar, with a focus on skills such as curiosity and cooperation, could accomplish many of the goals of the YoS.
Merrow’s goals, while admirable, do not seem to have been taken up by the public – if anything, his book, published six years ago, seems to be more a history of paths not taken in the wake of the battles we now see raging in public schools across the country.
Is the situation hopeless then? I believe that something radical will probably have to happen for the political climate to accept such a large increase in social spending for something that, by definition, will not pay off quickly. Also, by definition, large swaths of the country will never experience the direct benefits of the program, as they will be too old to participate.  
And yet…there’s a strong feeling that things in the US are going in the wrong direction. Distrust amongst institutions seems to grow every year. Political consensus seems to shrink. If ever there was a time for something akin to mandatory national service, this would be it. 
In conclusion, it’s important to note that the art of the possible changes drastically when the impossible happens. It’s impossible to accurately predict the future but I believe something huge would have to happen for the country to embrace a national service program, on this size, for long. Something like the list of events I kicked the show off with.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Elegant Ramblings. If you’ve enjoyed the episode, please like and subscribe to the show, either on iTunes or YouTube. You’ll be able to find show notes there. Next episode, I will be covering the onslaught (or is it?) of AI on our day to day lives. Hope you enjoyed. Bye for now.