Earlier this month, it was announced that the DOGE cuts have come for AmeriCorps. Current service members were told to go home early, effectively ending their service year. Per an AP article, “About two dozen states sued the Trump administration Tuesday over the dismantling of AmeriCorps, the 30-year-old federal agency for volunteer service, and over the cancellation of hundreds of millions of dollars in grant funding for state and community projects across the U.S.”
I mentioned in a previous episode that I served in AmeriCorps NCCC in 2008 and 2009, was very proud of my service, and thought it would be a good model for an expanded, mandatory national service program. Obviously, this news is hard to hear and I wanted to share my thoughts in this episode on my feelings and what I see for the possible future of the program. 
The disappointment of the news is on several levels – the fact that DOGE went around the normal procedures of Congressional oversight, sending those currently serving home early while leaving the program’s future uncertain; that the mission of DOGE – while perhaps admirable, is in no way shape or form realistically going to achieve it’s goals by targeting small programs like US Aid or AmeriCorps; that the media has not covered the story to any real degree; with the exception of a Rolling Stone article, I haven’t seen any national coverage of this story. Finally, from a symbolic standpoint, the axing of AmeriCorps is an indication that the divide of Americans will continue and that we do not live in a country serious about shared obligations or coming together to solve real problems.
For those who are unfamiliar, which may be many, given that this initiative only started since the beginning of the Trump term – here is a brief description on DOGE, from a CNN article by Jeremy Herb, Eric Bradner, and Tami Luhby entitled ‘Just never been anything like DOGE’: Inside Elon Musk’s turbulent takeover of government in Trump’s first 100 days: 
Driven by a band of 20-something coders and computer experts burrowing into agencies across the government, DOGE has thrown aside norms – and in some cases, federal laws – to forcibly cut spending, cancel federal contracts and building leases, and dismantle entire agencies.
DOGE has forced its way into some of the government’s most sensitive systems, which process trillions of dollars in federal payments and contain personal data for hundreds of millions of Americans, as well as federal workers and immigrants. Along the way, it’s fired more than 100,000 government employees, including highly trained scientists and experts in a host of fields such as public health, foreign aid and diplomacy and disaster management…Musk initially boasted that he could cut $2 trillion from the nation’s roughly $6.8 trillion federal budget, which is more money than the federal government spends on defense, education, veterans’ health combined. He walked back his goal in early January, saying that $1 trillion would be “an epic outcome,” and reportedly seemed to lower the total to $150 billion for the coming fiscal year at a Cabinet meeting earlier this month.
Musk indicated in a press interview earlier this week that he would be cutting back his personal involvement with the program while indicating dissatisfaction with the results. These thoughts have been echoed by deficit hawks. 
I think Jessica Riedl summed up my feelings brilliantly in a recent Newsweek article: “Think of Congress and its budget as the debt-ridden dad on the way to buy a $250,000 Ferrari on the credit card, and DOGE is the $2 off gas card he used along the way. It's great that he saved $2 on gas, but I think his wife may be more concerned about the $250,000 car."
What Riedl is alluding to and what was made clear in the CNN article is that you simply can’t cut nearly a third of the budget going after the edges – you have to go after entitlement spending and the military, which voters are loathe to do, especially the senior citizens who view Social Security and Medicare as their birth rights, even if they, ultimately, will have taken out more from the programs then they have paid in. I spoke about this issue at length in my previous episode on the likelihood of a Value Added Tax and would suggest checking out that episode for more information if you’re interested in that topic. 
So DOGE failed and it’s likely that this lawsuit will wade its way through the courts, hopefully resulting in a quick restoration of AmeriCorps to its current budget. Time will tell – I imagine this ruling will take at least a month or two. I believe that the ruling will be favorable to the program, given the clear precedent from the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. 
Does this mean that AmeriCorps is off the chopping block forever? No, of course not. I think it’s important to note here that AmeriCorps has long had a history of being a program disliked by budget hawks, so its not surprising for us aware of the program to see it, along with USAid as targeted programs. Just one example occurred in 2011 when the House considered slashing the program as part of a continuing resolution, though talks of eliminating the program also resurfaced during the first Trump term.
Why is the program so vulnerable? Unlike the military, AmeriCorps is relatively young. VISTA was started under the LBJ administration in 1965, followed by Senior Corps a few years later, and AmeriCorps NCCC and State and National in 1993. These four programs are all under the AmeriCorps umbrella and are overseen by CNCS, the Corporation for National and Community Service. Per the AP article noted above, in a given year, roughly 200,000 people serve in the program, with 2000 of those serving in NCCC. AmeriCorps members typically serve, at most, a couple of years, so the careerism seen in the military is absent here. At 1.3 million active members, the military is much larger and the network of retired military is also larger, and more likely to be in positions of influence and hiring that allow for former military to look out for each other in a way that isn’t true of AmeriCorps alum. 
What work does AmeriCorps do? It depends. State and National programs typically serve in a single organization for a year – California Conservation Corps would be an example of this. VISTA members serve organizations that fight or ameliorate the effects of poverty, so writing grants for expanding a rural food bank would be an example here. I served in AmeriCorps NCCC, which typically rotates through 4 projects in a 10-month term, so everything from invasive species removal to planting trees to building homes with Habitat for Humanity. FEMACorps members partner with FEMA in order to help those who are recovering from natural disasters.
In exchange for service work, AmeriCorps members typically make roughly minimum wage. In my program, AmeriCorps NCCC, your food, housing, and transportation were all provided collectively, meaning these were provided at no cost to the corps member but shared with the team. We also received an education award that was worth roughly $5,500 per year of service, which could be used to pay off student loans or used to pay for tuition or other educational expenses.
Given all that great work, why is the program seemingly always on the chopping block?
Until the program is able to tell its story to those not in the program, or those who do not come from a family of service, the program will continue to look like something for other people and not for them. This is a very old problem that marketers have been working on for hundreds of years. Why isn’t AmeriCorps able to market itself? One of the obvious reasons is money – per the GAO (Government of Accountability Office), the military spent, in fiscal year 2023, 1.8B in advertisement costs across all its branches. This is nearly the cost of the entire CNCS budget, which is around 2B in FY 2025. So if there is no money in the budget and the alum network is relatively small, what else can AmeriCorps do to tell its story? The obvious answer is to find some way to go viral or use famous alums to drum up support. On the second point, George RR Martin is by far our most famous alum and, while he has talked positively about his time in the program in the past, I don’t think he wants to be the face of the program – I also think it would probably damage the program’s popularity, at least with A Song of Ice and Fire fans, if he added “AmeriCorps Spokesman” to his already crowded plate. Planning to go viral (which is an oxymoron but I don’t know what else one could call it? Aiming for the fences?) would require a digital team that understands the medium – I don’t see that anywhere in the miniscule budget that the program has, compared to the DoD. I don’t know if it needs to be stated but a slow-moving large bureaucracy is not typically conducive to making cutting edge advertisements that are going to resonate with young people. 
There have been attempts to make content – there is a YouTube page with some clips of service members. I think there is an important distinction between documentation and advertisement. I’m reminded of the movie Who Killed the Electric Car?, which is about the death of the EV1 and, as an extension, the entire EV – electric vehicle – market in the United States in the early 2000s. One of the theories for why the EV1 failed to catch on was that the manufacturer, General Motors, failed to properly advertise the product. One of the subjects for the doc said: “We never saw a tv ad with an electric car scampering up the side of a hill with a good-looking man or woman draped around it. That's the way they sell cars.”
The military knows this – I distinctively remember an Army ad from years ago with a Jessica Biehl-look alike doing sit-ups. I don’t think the program does an adequate job of documenting what it does but it does an even worse job in selling itself as something that the average person wants to join. In other words, it’s just not sexy– also, can we do something about that logo? 
Whether or not the sex appeal is possible, more is needed to spread the word about the program.
The lack of common knowledge of the program isn’t uniform – in my experience, people working in non-profits and the government tend to have heard of the program, while people in the private sector have not. Due to the small alumni network and the lack of advertisement, I don’t think it’s fair to be angry at someone for pronouncing my program as Ameri Corpse, though it still hurts when they do.
Before we look ahead to where the program goes from here, a word from our sponsor.
I think the program is very important to the communities it serves, especially in times of disaster. Beyond that the program takes young people and puts them with others who are very unlike them – in terms, not only of political viewpoint, race, class, and geography but also by education and maturity. It’s this mix that is most important, in my opinion, to the continued efficacy of the program. I talked about this a bit in my episode on the value of a national service program. We seem to be moving along two separate political tracks simultaneously – one is a combination of libertarianism when it comes to vice (crypto, sports gambling, marijuana legalization) and populist nationalism when it comes to everything else and the other views itself as a coalition of the disenfranchised, though to what degree this viewpoint is self-delusional is up for debate. I don’t see a serious third party becoming a reality in the United States anytime soon – the fact that No Labels did not run a candidate in 2024, when there was a coined term - Double Hater - to express how dissatisfied a large swath of voters were with their presidential choices doesn’t bode well for this happening anytime in the near future. 
Assuming that there is not a great centrist walking through the door anytime soon that is able to heal the political divisions of the country, we have to consider what has driven this political division and ways to heal it. I see AmeriCorps as one of few tools that can be used to begin the healing. My program, AmeriCorps NCCC, is the most expensive AmeriCorps program because it is residential, meaning that the program itself provides housing. This is different from the other programs, though many of the AmeriCorps programs encourage their members to take out food stamps because the salaries for these positions tend to be at poverty levels. The benefit of having a residential program is that, because you live and work with the same 10 or so people for the majority of your service term, you really know them on a deep level and this leads often to a greater tolerance and understanding of where you may differ from someone and why – and maybe more importantly, you learn the tools needed to bypass these differences and see people as individuals instead of as symbols or stereotypes.
I went to five years of undergrad and two years of graduate classes and I have never had anywhere close to this experience during my time at college. I realize that this is not the “what’s wrong with college” episode – I did that in an earlier episode if you want to check that one out but I think it’s important to note that there is a chasm between the ideal version of college, where young people passionately exchange ideas and debate late into the gentle evening in order to find the truth and beauty in the universe and the reality, where most students try to take the absolute bare minimum in extracurriculars (silly things like ethics and humanities courses) and are just grinding to get through the experience before the student loan money runs out and their parents have to take out a six figure Parent Plus loan because they failed Business Calc again. 
While AmeriCorps isn’t perfect (what is?) and could be a more inclusive program – due to the relatively low pay, I believe the program discourages the truly poor, young people living with their parent or parents and siblings whose income is needed in order to make ends meet for the family, from applying. I think this, perhaps unfairly, labels the program as something only for rich kids looking for a fun way to pass the time between graduating college and moving into the real world – I don’t think these problems are insurmountable and the benefits greatly outweigh the limitations. When the program is at its best, it allows for a true exchange of ideas due to the closeness of the team you serve with; I don’t think these bonds are easily replicable elsewhere. 
I’m sympathetic – though skeptical – of most other ideas to do this en masse. David Brooks, whose political leanings are hard to categorize these days – If I had to pin him down, I’d say he’s something of a conservative Liberal communitarian – has founded an organization called Weave. Funded through the Aspen Institute, Weave aims to take on, per its website, “the problem of broken social trust that has left Americans divided, lonely, and in social gridlock. Weave connects, supports, and invests in local leaders stepping up to weave a new, inclusive social fabric where they live.” He’s written about this organization in his book, The Second Mountain. As I understand the vision, David believes that people who have achieved great financial success in climbing the mountain – an apt image that adorns many a motivational poster – will, having reached the lofty heights of success, then turn their eyes towards the second mountain, the one associated with selflessness and helping others. He does note that there are those who climb the second mountain early or throughout their life. For those that are climbing it after their career success, Brooks believes that these people, who often have had success in the corporate world, will take their pro-social skills back to the areas “left behind” (left behind in quotes) and serve to be the connectors, in Malcolm Gladwell’s parlance, in these communities. 
However, this is not what we’re seeing. Per a 2025 Yahoo article from Snejana Farberov, “Young adults have been flocking to small towns and rural areas at the most dramatic pace in decades—and it’s a trend that’s not letting up anytime soon. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, internal migration took an unexpected turn with large numbers of younger adults aged 25 to 44 flocking to these areas. And as a result, they’ve been fueling a small-town revival, according to Hamilton Lombard, estimates program manager of the Demographics Research Group at the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Research. The 2023 county population estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau in spring 2024 showed that since 2020, two-thirds of growth in the population occurred in areas with fewer than 1 million residents, or in rural counties.”
Of course, there is nothing saying that young adults can’t serve as connectors as well but it’s more likely that people moving to these areas are not going to have the time to build community as their main focus – as they are in the prime years for career growth and raising children. If David is right and that an influx of wealthy Boomers are primed to return to their hometowns and begin weaving a new social fabric, the questions remain: where are they and what’s stopping them? They are the wealthiest generation in the history of the world. The youngest boomers are now in their 60s – if they were truly going to do what David suggest, well, why haven’t they done it yet? What are they waiting for?
Assuming that Weave doesn’t break through on a grand level, are there other tools that can be used to rebuild communities and enable connections across deep fault lines like race, class, and political ideology?
Realistically, colleges could also be this but, as I mentioned above, they aren’t. Not least of all because only roughly 60% of young Americans attend college – historically, this group is more likely to have had parents who attended college and are less likely to be in poverty than the group as a whole. Even if you accept that you’re not reaching 40% of your intended audience, college has not recently been a tool for unity, as we’ve seen several controversies at the university level in just the last 3 or 4 years which have shaken the once bedrock belief that college was an unalloyed public good. 
We also see a change in what students are studying – STEM and Business degrees are up; Education, English, and Humanities are down. If we want students to be well-rounded and need them to take philosophy courses in order to understand virtue ethics, we’re going to likely have to force them to do so – which won’t be popular with anyone.
K-12 education is also very stratified, not only by class but also by race, so that is also not likely an area where we should expect to see deep changes quickly. Add on to this the rise of Virtual Schools – which expanded during COVID and are likely to grow over the next decade. Without addressing the “digital divide”, which the NIH described as “unequal access to technology”, virtual schools may increase segregation and decrease opportunities for people from different walks of life to interact on a daily basis.
With a  2,000 member a year roster, AmeriCorps NCCC is not going to be the end all and the be all for bringing people together. Still, I think the program doesn’t have to stay in the stasis that it is currently in, assuming, of course, that it is brought back to life via lawsuit.
Best case scenario – this serves as a wake-up call to those, admittedly few of us, who may have taken the program for granted and now see the need to expand the program, not just the work that it does but expand it where it really matters and where it has failed to take a hold over the last fifty years – in the mind of the average American.
I don’t know how that would happen – one of my main frustrations with what has happened is the dearth of media coverage. For a program that has been around since the mid-1960s, the possible death blow was met with a resounding silence. Even acknowledging that the world is a very complicated place and that the current political climate feels like drinking out of a firehose, it was still disappointing to not see the coverage, especially from public media sources like PBS. 
If you’re not going to get media coverage at the time of a program’s death, when will you?
The alternatives are to find more grassroots methods of communicating what the program does and the importance of the program. I’ve talked a lot about the intangibles of the program in this essay – the value of human connection and bonding with people you have differences with. Measuring the value of the program has always been hard: how do you place a monetary value on something that is inherently unmeasurable – how do you price harmony? Or understanding? Or tolerance? There is, of course, also the real value of the work done, the houses built, the trees planted, and the lives made easier after disasters, as well. 
This essay may sound like a lot of complaining without a lot of direction or answers. You’re right to feel that way – this is exactly what this is. Supposing that the program comes back, unless there are major changes, the program will serve mostly to be a nuisance to fiscal conservatives until such a time that they have the Congressional votes to permanently end it. The fact that the program has made it this long is probably as much due to Congressional deadlock as to the efficacy of the program in the eyes of the American people. 
I hope that if AmeriCorps does return, we can use it as a moment to reflect on what we can do, collectively, to make sure that it doesn’t return to the chopping block again in short order.
Something to think about while I’m wrapping this episode up – should the program change? If so, how? Into what? 
Finally, if the program does die, if this is truly the end and Congress decides not to provide funding, I would ask all my fellow alum to have hope that someday, maybe 10 or 15 or 20 years from now, there will be a clarion call for a revival of national service and I would call on us all to serve as a bridge from the CCC work that was done during the 1930s to the new generation, to whatever the new program will be. I think that would be the best way to honor the work that we’ve done – to be a bridge for service into the future.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Elegant Ramblings. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard, please consider liking and subscribing to the channel on iTunes or YouTube. You’ll be able to find show notes there. Hope you enjoyed. Bye for now.