The latest national service reports detail the AmeriCorps footprint across all 50 states, Washington, DC, and U.S. territories.
WASHINGTON, DC— AmeriCorps, the federal agency for national service and volunteerism, released today the 2025 National Service Reports. The reports provide a comprehensive view of the financial investments made by AmeriCorps across all 50 states, Washington, DC, and U.S. territories. These profiles review how each state and their local partners leveraged federal investments, in addition to highlighting the number of AmeriCorps members and AmeriCorps Seniors volunteers who served between February 23, 2024 and February 21, 2025.
These state reports demonstrate the scope of AmeriCorps’ presence throughout the nation with programs in nearly 35,000 locations spanning urban, rural, and tribal communities. AmeriCorps members and AmeriCorps Seniors volunteers serve at nonprofit, faith-based, municipal and community-based organizations to address the nation’s most pressing issues in six core focus areas: education, economic opportunity, disaster services, environmental stewardship, healthy futures and veterans and military families. The top five states receiving AmeriCorps and non-federal funding include California ($131.1 million), Texas ($70.4 million), Minnesota ($64.5 million), New York ($59.1 million) and Florida ($52.2 million). See a full list of reports by state.
“AmeriCorps works for America,” said Jennifer Bastress Tahmasebi, Interim Agency Head, AmeriCorps. “Our latest National Service Reports prove it, showing strong returns on investment across all 50 states, U.S. territories, and DC. Through evidence-based projects meeting urgent local needs, we engaged 200,000 Americans in sustained service last year, who then inspired 1.9 million more volunteers to join in.”
Between January of 2023 and January of 2024, 200,000 AmeriCorps members and AmeriCorps Seniors volunteers supported student success, connected veterans to services, provided key services to fight the opioid epidemic, helped seniors live independently, and rebuilt communities after disasters. Almost 60,000 of these participants were AmeriCorps members who received a Segal AmeriCorps Education Award, which can be used to pay down student loans or cover tuition, as AmeriCorps alumni further their education and improve their career prospects. Since 1994, AmeriCorps participants have earned a total of $4.8 billion in Segal AmeriCorps Education Awards. 86 percent of these members report that their service has furthered their professional goals, leading to communities across America benefitting from improved local employment outcomes as a result of service with AmeriCorps.
AmeriCorps, the federal agency for national service and volunteerism, provides opportunities for Americans to serve their country domestically, address the nation’s most pressing challenges, improve lives and communities, and strengthen civic engagement. Each year, the agency places more than 200,000 AmeriCorps members and AmeriCorps Seniors volunteers in intensive service roles; and empowers millions more to serve as long-term, short-term, or one-time volunteers. Learn more at AmeriCorps.gov.
AmeriCorps offers opportunities for individuals of all backgrounds to be a part of the national service community, grow personally and professionally, and receive benefits for their service. Learn how to get involved at AmeriCorps.gov/Serve.
U.S. District Court Judge Deborah L. Boardman on Thursday issued an 86-page preliminary injunction stating the Trump Administration must restore millions of dollars in AmeriCorps grant funding and the employment of thousands of its service members.
This comes after two dozen states sued the administration in late April over the cuts to funding. The temporary block to the administration is only applicable to the states that sued the administration, which includes Colorado.
Attorney General Phil Weiser in a statement on Thursday in response to the ruling said, “The illegal cuts to AmeriCorps threaten Colorado communities that rely on program volunteers to provide services to military veterans, older Americans aging in place, people dealing with substance abuse, and wildfire mitigation support.”
The cuts to grant funding were headed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. AmeriCorps was budgeted through Congress, which approved spending of $557 million this year. It has an average operating budget of more than $1 billion.
Boardman allowed for the reduction in AmeriCorps’ workforce, effectively denying the states’ request to restore the majority of staff that were placed on administrative leave. At least 85 percent of the 500 full-time federal AmeriCorps staff were put on administrative leave in late April, some with very little notice.
Boardman’s ruling also allowed for National Civilian Community Corps members to be reinstated only if they are willing and able, according to the Associated Press.
Attorneys general in 24 states and the District of Columbia filed a joint lawsuit in late April. Weiser said the coalition of states is arguing that the Trump Administration acted unlawfully in cutting AmeriCorps, violating the Administrative Procedure Act and the separation of powers under the U.S. Constitution.
“The true spirit of service embodied by the hundreds of AmeriCorps members and volunteers across the state is something that gives me hope in the future,” Weiser said. “As the judge says in the opinion, ‘these volunteers represent the best of us.’ The mass closure of AmeriCorps programs, removal of national service corps members from service, and the termination of federal funding makes no sense.”
Most AmeriCorps members are between the ages of 22 and 26. More than 1,000 members were in service across Colorado at the time of the cuts. The San Luis Valley hosts a current cohort of 18 members who primarily worked through La Puente.
TJ Mendez, who oversees AmeriCorps volunteers in south-central Colorado as part of the Rural Alliance for Dignity, or RAD, which includes the Valley, was notified late at night in April of the cuts. He oversees 35 members across the region.
“All 35 of my members were part of that 33,000,” Mendez said in an earlier story.
He said without AmeriCorps volunteers, a drastic reduction in services would ensue. “We cannot sustain our current programming without these AmeriCorps members. So our services are going to be drastically affected.”
Alamosa Citizen reached out to Mendez for comment on the injunction but hasn’t received word at the time of writing.
La Puente executive director Lance Cheslock noted that for the past three years, the San Luis Valley has hosted more than 120 AmeriCorps members who have provided more than 250,000 hours of service.
At La Puente, AmeriCorps volunteer service included distributing more than 1 million meals, serving more than 12,000 distinct families. These volunteers are among a long list of young people who have become part of the fabric of rural communities, he said.
A 2022 study found that for every federal dollar spent, AmeriCorps volunteers generate as much as $34 in value. They are the “elbow grease, the manpower” in the Valley’s communities, Mendez said.
“Every region in Colorado has directly benefited from the contributions of AmeriCorps members. This win today is important, but I won’t stop fighting until we’ve permanently put a stop to the Trump Administration’s reckless and shortsighted attempt to destroy AmeriCorps and the spirit of community service for which it stands,” said Weiser.
A federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s wholesale dismantling of AmeriCorps, an independent federal agency that facilitates public community service opportunities, reversing the termination of its grants and volunteer network across 24 Democratic-led states.
In an opinion explaining the ruling, Judge Deborah L. Boardman of the Federal District Court in Maryland wrote that the various programs funded through AmeriCorps — which include public health, veteran transition services, conservation and environmental protection, and education support — have come to fill a void in government services in many parts of the country.
The sudden suspension of those programs, which she emphasized was done at the behest of the Department of Government Efficiency, left states marooned and struggling to provide for their residents, she concluded.
The government had argued that if it were ordered to restore the grant programs, but eventually prevailed in the case, it could stand to lose millions of dollars that would be impossible to recover.
To underscore her point about the critical nature of the agency’s work, Judge Boardman reversed that logic.
“If, at the end of this litigation, the government is vindicated and cannot recover the funds that Congress appropriated for national service,” she wrote, “the funds will have been spent on improving the lives of everyday Americans: veterans, people with substance use disorder, people with disabilities, children with learning differences, Indigenous communities, people impacted by natural disasters and people trying to survive below the poverty line, Any harm the defendants might face if the agency actions are enjoined pales in comparison to the concrete harms that the states and the communities served by AmeriCorps programs have suffered and will continue to suffer.”
Ticking through the diverse services AmeriCorps volunteers provide, Judge Boardman listed a handful of them in her opinion, mentioning disaster recovery after the California wildfires, awareness programs to fight opioid misuse, and teacher residencies that support special education and low-achieving elementary school students.
While the order preserved the programs and their funding across the 24 states involved in the lawsuit, it did not reverse cuts to the agency’s staff of roughly 700 people, which was dramatically downsized.
In April, the Trump administration took a series of steps to dismantle AmeriCorps, including firing nearly 85 percent of its employees and terminating more than 1,000 grants that supported its tens of thousands of volunteers with roughly $400 million in federal funding. It also shuttered the National Civilian Community Corps, a full-time residential volunteer program, recalling about 750 participants in the program stationed around the country.
The moves were spearheaded by Elon Musk and his associates with the Department of Government Efficiency, who descended upon the agency with an eye to dismantling it within weeks, using the same blitz playbook used on other congressionally funded entities like the U.S. Institute of Peace.
A coalition of 24 states and the District of Columbia sued to stop the effort, citing scores of key services that the program cuts had jeopardized.
Especially after the Supreme Court recently weighed whether to prohibit district courts from issuing sweeping nationwide actions, judges have been cautious about delivering such rulings. In her opinion, Judge Boardman, who was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., detailed her rationale for keeping the order tailored.
In limiting her order to the grants and programs supporting the 24 states that sued, only volunteers working in those states could be restored. That included participants in programs such as VISTA, the agency’s most popular anti-poverty program.
But Judge Boardman found that trying to impose the same limitations on the National Civilian Community Corps would be “neither practical nor feasible” because of its structure. She noted that the program’s members rotate through short-term projects across multiple states in a given year, and could not be returned to work only in service of the two dozen states that sued.
She ordered that the program be returned to the status quo before the Trump administration cuts took effect in April, and that its participants resume their work “if they are willing and able to return.”
Zach Montague is a Times reporter covering the U.S. Department of Education, the White House and federal courts.
Published on September 9, 2021 | Updated on June 6, 2025 The School of Life
A near-universal goal of parents is to try to imbue their children with confidence; to try to lend them the energy, self-belief and courage to eventually be able to act decisively in the world. With sufficient confidence, they will know how to go up to strangers and ask for help, push their interests forward at work, articulate their wishes to prospective partners and trust in their decency and right to exist.
But how to imbue this confidence remains a complex matter. The standard approach involves trying to remind children of their qualities: whatever they may sometimes feel, they are clever. Whatever a few mean people might say, they are special. Whatever they may think in front of the mirror, they are beautiful. Whatever they sometimes fear, they are neither idiots nor fools. With such generous sentiments in their ears, children will – we trust – have a chance of confronting challenges without being interrupted by a sense of inadequacy. They will know that despite the difficulties, they are competent and deserving – and that the world should be grateful for their presence.
Although this sounds generous, exulting a child in this way may unwittingly generate whole new levels of doubt. The implication is that grounds for confidence are primarily derived from being clever, talented, beautiful and deserving. Yet by equating confidence with wondrousness, the child is being burdened with a forbidding picture of what is required for success. The bar is unconsciously being set in an elevated position; one is just being assured – slightly unbelievably – that one will clear it.
It might be better to push in a slightly different direction. Sensitive children are in danger of overestimating the adult world and thereby of throttling their talents and sense of initiative out of misfounded respect. It can seem to them as if teachers must know everything, so there is no need to think sceptically about most of what they teach. It can seem as if people at the top of important professions have been endowed with unusual degrees of intelligence, which makes their jobs impossible to get. And in their own peer group, it can look as though the popular and attractive people must have life securely worked out at every level, and could therefore have no need for a new friend or partner.
In this context, it may help a young person to be given access to some apparently dark but in the end liberating truths about the adult world. Despite certain appearances, and a lot of puffery and decorum, human beings are not on the whole an especially clever, competent, knowledgeable or respectable species. Indeed, as a rule, they are properly idiotic and rather damnable. The path to confidence is not to build up a child; it is to knock down society as a whole.
To appease a child’s terror that they might be stupid, rather than telling them that they are brilliant, one should let them know a far more cheering and believable idea: that they have foolish sides, but so has everyone else. They are definitely sometimes idiots, but so is the headmistress, the geography teacher, the president, the finance minister, the Nobel Prize winner, the great novelist, the zoologist, the movie star and all parents who have ever lived. There is no other option for a human being. We are a planet of seven billion idiots. We walk into doors, get things wrong, proffer moronic ideas, spill things down our fronts, forget our own names and ruin our lives – and these aren’t exceptions; they are the general rule. A worry that one might be a bit stupid doesn’t therefore mark one as special or specially damned; it makes one more like every other human in history. It certainly isn’t an argument for not trying to join a team or asking someone on a date, for refusing to apply to a particular university or imagine oneself in a given career.
It would have been hard to see much of a crisis brewing at the Arlington Mill Community Center, given the joyful stream of middle-schoolers bolting inside last month.
But it was there in the way 11-year-old Mason Soto greeted his teacher, Andrew Gelsinger.
“Mr. Andrew!” yelled Mason, running into the classroom. “You’re still here!”
Less than a week had passed since Gelsinger abruptly lost his position at the free after-school program in Northern Virginia — one of tens of thousands of roles funded by AmeriCorps that were slashed in cuts to that federal agency.
Gelsinger sat in the classroom with his students, some of them weeping, as they were told they would not be able to come back to Aspire Afterschool Learning to start their homework, grab a snack or play volleyball.
Just a few days later, Gelsinger’s bosses tapped into surplus funds to bring him and most other teachers back through the summer. How much the nonprofit’s budget could stretch after that, though, was uncertain.
In April, the Trump administration’s U.S. DOGE Service canceled nearly $400 million in AmeriCorps grants, effectively firing service members at Aspire and more than 1,000 other organizations across the country. Those groups were told the lost funding “no longer effectuates agency priorities.”S
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly has said AmeriCorps, an independent federal agency, was “a target-rich environment for President Trump’s agenda to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse” after failing eight consecutive audits.
Less than seven miles from the Oval Office — past the diners, taquerias and hair salons along Columbia Pike — here’s a sampling of what could be eliminated:🌸
Aspire teachers such as Gelsinger, who makes less than $30,000 a year, would lose their year-long positions. People such as Mason’s dad, a construction worker whose shifts often end past the final bell at his son’s middle school, would go without free child care and have to find and pay for it elsewhere. And students such as Mason, a mischievous kid in thick, rectangular glasses, would no longer have someone to teach and care for them after school. Instead, they would spend the afternoon alone.
The nonprofit’s leaders estimated that, following DOGE’s cuts, Aspire would be forced to serve as many as 50 fewer students per year.
On the day he and his teacher returned to class, Mason shifted his gaze to a laminated sheet pinned up in the back of the classroom, where Gelsinger was marking the boy’s attendance with five green dots.
“Mr. Andrew, what’s the schedule today?” he asked.
“We’re doing phonics,” Gelsinger answered, pointing to the whiteboard at the front.
The word of the week, scrawled in big, black letters, was “DISASSEMBLE: To take apart, to come apart, to disperse/scatter.”
Gelsinger fixated on the definition. It was, he later said, an apt summary of what might happen to Aspire.
Help for families in need
Aspire was created in 1994 to serve families that fall outside the more widely known image of Arlington County, a wealthy D.C. suburb that is home to lobbyists, federal workers and the Pentagon.
The Arlington parents who send their children to the nonprofit — at no cost — are the nurses, day laborers and janitors who make this community function for everyone else. Many of them can’t afford tutors or summer camps. In some cases, recently arrived immigrant parents rely on Aspire’s teachers to help their children pick up English.
Over the past three decades, the organization has grown from a shoestring operation inside a church basement to a nonprofit with a dedicated space in a county community center, where a group of largely Black and Latino students — most of whom qualify for free or reduced-price lunch — come after school for extra lessons in math, reading and writing.
Juan Jose Soto, Mason’s father, said it was an easy decision to send the 11-year-old and his older brother there, given the difficulties in finding someone to watch them. He and his wife worried about them walking home alone after the older son, Joseph, was hit by a car while heading back from the bus stop by himself.
“Work doesn’t allow us to be on top of them all the time,” Soto said. “They don’t have anyone to watch over them. They’re safer here.”
Mason would get distracted easily at school, but at Aspire he was able to catch up and pushed his grades toward a mix of A’s and B’s.
A big part of that, Soto noted, was the teachers. Most classrooms had a pair of them, and in this case Gelsinger and his co-teacher, Dakota Yoon, managed to coax a restless kid who often blurted out comments in class to jot down his thoughts in a notebook instead.
Gelsinger, who moved every few years for his parents’ jobs, wanted to stick around the D.C. area after graduating from the University of Maryland. Earlier in the pandemic, he worked for a company that distributed coronavirus vaccines.
But every day felt monotonous there. Looking for a change, he applied at Aspire last year.
The position paid a “stipend” amounting to little more than the Virginia minimum wage — plus some student-loan relief. But seeing the children’s progress, week by week, made it feel worth it, Gelsinger said.
The eldest of four siblings, he loved working with the middle-schoolers, giving shout-outs to students who made big improvements so the rest of the class could hear.
“Now they’ll come in and, like, rush over to show their math test,” he said, “and it’s an 85. Which for most kids isn’t the greatest thing in the world. But for some of these kids, that’s a huge step forward.”
A dreaded email arrives
The three-sentence email arrived in Paula Fynboh’s inbox on a Monday afternoon in April, around the time Gelsinger and Yoon would have been leading their middle-school classroom in their daily “free choice” period.
“Pursuant to this notice of termination, all activities related to your grant should cease immediately,” the email read.
AmeriCorps already had been cutting programs across the country in reaction to the Trump administration’s efforts to cut government spending. Fynboh, who is Aspire’s executive director, had a bad feeling her program would be next.
The notice meant that Aspire’s 17 AmeriCorps service members, most of whom lead classrooms from third grade to middle school, could no longer get paid.
That afternoon, she allowed the classes to carry on as normal and offered the AmeriCorps service members the chance to return the following day — purely as volunteers — to wrap things up with their students. When the children got the news, some could not hold back their emotions.
A worried Mason did not know what to do. He had so many homework assignments the next week, he told his teachers, and now he had no idea how to finish them all.
He and Gelsinger sat togetherfor an hour and a half, tackling as many of his math problems as they could.
At night, he told his parents that he did not understand. “Why are they doing this? Why are they taking this away from me?” Soto recalled him asking.
At home in Greenbelt, Maryland, Gelsinger asked himself similar questions. He sent out four job applications that night.
“Everyone there is serving for not that much, and we have a $3 trillion budget as a country. You can’t pay to help the kids?” he said. “They’re smart. They care. Their parents just don’t always have the means to help them.”
Families trying to pitch in
The program’s directors joined a lawsuit against the federal government. They appealed to county lawmakers, who offered words of support but no financial assistance.
The Aspire board of directors decided to hire back the AmeriCorps service members, funding those positions through the end of its summer program. Come August, it could convert some positions into full-time staff jobs, using the rest of Aspire’s budget: $1.4 million that comes from state and local grants and corporate and personal donations.
But the math was unavoidable: If Aspire wanted to maintain reasonable class sizes — about a dozen students per teacher — the 150-child program would have to shrink by about a third.
Fynboh pulled out a sketch of a dollar bill one student had drawn,meant as a contribution to the program’s coffers. Even cash-strapped families were trying to pitch in as the organization scrambled to raise money,she said.
“It’s so touching because our parents may have very little,” Fynboh said, “but they still want to try to help.”
She was concerned that some students could miss out on reading and math help because they would have to take care of younger siblings after school, she said. Others might go without a hot meal in the afternoon. Families — most of whom would be eligible for a 75 percent discount on Arlington’s summer-camp programs — mightnot be able to afford even that sharply reduced cost.
Down the hall in the middle-school classroom, some students munched on plates of meat loaf and cucumber salad. A group of girls crowded around Yoon as one showed her photos from a cousin’s sweet 16 birthday celebration.
She and Gelsinger gathered them to start a phonics lesson, a routine they have followed since August.
“We’re so excited to have you all back,” Gelsinger told them. “We’re so excited to be back.”
How long that would last, though, he was not sure.
When Florenzo Cribbs walked into the Perry Family Free Clinic each week in Madison, Wisconsin, Parker Kuehni and his colleagues erupted in applause. It is a tradition there. Every patient who shows upis cheered for keeping their appointment.
Kuehni, a 25-year-old AmeriCorps member, scheduled Cribbs’s medical, dental and mental health visits, prepped his exam room, took his health history and handed him off to the clinic’s volunteer doctors. He also greeted Cribbs, asked about his week and talked with him in the waiting room, before seeing him out. He followed up later with resources for food, housing or insurance.
That kind of personal attention, often missing from health care, was abruptly eliminated last month whenKuehni was laid off from AmeriCorps. “It was a complete shock,” he said. “We are helping people stay alive.”
The April 25 move was one of the biggestgovernment cutbackssince the Trump administration took office, but went largely unnoticed because most of the jobs were concentrated in nonprofit human services agencies that help underserved communities.
AmeriCorps workers across the United States were told their positions were eliminated “effective immediately,” according to an email reviewed by The Washington Post. The decision came fromElon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service and canceled almost $400 million in grants without public notice or legal procedure, prompting lawsuits by almost two dozen states and D.C.
A national service program established in 1993 under President Bill Clinton, AmeriCorps builds on earlier efforts such as Volunteers in Service to America, which began in 1965 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty.
It places recent college graduates and early-career professionals in thousands of nonprofit, community and public agencies across the country, providing living stipends that average about $18,000 per year and an education award of approximately $7,395 to pay for college or reduce student-loan debt.
Although they are not licensed professionals, service members often work in programs with staff and resource shortages, doing work as varied as tutoring students or responding to natural disasters.
Officials with AmeriCorps did not respond to requests for comment on the cuts, which extended far and wide, disrupting services that reached deep into communities across the country.
Montclair Community Farms in New Jersey lost four AmeriCorps team members during peak growing season. The reduction will hinder the organization’s ability to provide affordable food across the community through mobile farm stands and food pantries.
The farm stands serve more than 1,500 people each summer, many of whom receive food stamps and live in food deserts, said Lana Mustafa, executive director of Montclair Community Farms.
In addition to the AmeriCorps grants being revoked, a $250,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture that supported nutrition education and funded a high school internship program was also suspended, Mustafa said.
“We have no answers. Nobody really knows what’s happening, and instead of receiving additional support, we’re watching our support being withdrawn,” Mustafa said. Now is the time to increase aid, not reduce it, she said, “because the people who need food the most will be struggling. Instead, we’re seeing food being taken away.”
In Buffalo, Kate Sarata, executive director of the Service Collaborative of WNY, said the cuts will reverberatethroughout the community. AmeriCorps volunteers from the organization, which focuses on workforce development, were in charge of helping to keep local parks clean and assist with maintenance.
In Boston, Walker Therapeutic and Educational Programs lost 25 AmeriCorps positions after its $286,000 grant was canceled. The wellness coaches had been deployed across 12 public schools as part of the Wellness Coach Project, which focused on youth mental health. The members worked directly with more than 200 students on issues such as anxiety, bullying, menstrual hygiene, social media stress and building healthy routines.
“These aren’t just staff members. They’re a lifeline,” said Jake Murray, chief external affairs officer at Walker. “We work in schools where students are struggling with real, day-to-day barriers to health and stability. And now that support is gone.”
“We’re now down 25 staff and have no way to replace them,” Murray said. “Even with private donations and state grants, we can’t make up the gap.”
Mark Hager, an emeritus professor in the School of Community Resources and Development at Arizona State University, has received money from AmeriCorps to study how to use volunteers more effectively in nonprofit work.
“This is a big blow to the national psyche,” he said. “We didn’t just lose workers. We lost support for young people learning about civic engagement, how to help their neighbors and how to build stronger communities.”
Hager said the sudden loss of AmeriCorps positions has left many small nonprofits scrambling. “In a lot of places, AmeriCorps members are not just support, they are the backbone.”
With fewer hands on deck, many programs across the country are bracing for slower services and longer wait times. According to Voices for National Service, a coalition of state, local and national service programs and commissions, AmeriCorps members provide 1.6 billion hours of service annually. In 2023, they supported almost 3 million people through education, disaster recovery and public health programs.
Aaron Perry, a former University of Wisconsin police officer and founder of the Perry Family Free Clinic, said he saw firsthand how Black men were being left behind by the health-care system.
“I would always ask them … what could be different?” Perry said. “And that’s when they would tell me, ‘I’m homeless. I haven’t eaten. I have a heart condition. I don’t have medication.’”
The clinic survives on an annual budget of $350,000 to $400,000, patched together from grants and private donations. A local health-care partner recently contributed $40,000 in emergency funds — half of which Perry used to offer small stipends to replace the lost federal money for AmeriCorps volunteers still working.
Despite its low profile, AmeriCorps has had steady support among Democrats and Republicans. Leaders from both parties have historically viewed the program as an effective way to strengthen communities.
In a letter to DOGE, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and several colleagues condemned the grant cancellations and warned that the decision may have violated federal law. They urged DOGE to reverse the cuts.
Matthew Hudson-Flege, a former AmeriCorps member, who studied the organization in his doctoral research, said the psychological fallout from the cuts may be as lasting as the operational impact.
“People were dedicating a year of their lives to serve their country, and they were suddenly told their contracts meant nothing. The word of our government just isn’t to be trusted anymore.”
He said that AmeriCorps has long helped build faith in public institutions. “Now, that trust has been broken. Rebuilding it, especially for younger generations, is going to take a long time.”
Cribbs said people like him are told to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Some of us don’t even have boots and some of us don’t even have strings in those boots.”
He said “Parker always made the appointment I had better just by having a little sympathy and having empathy for what people were going through. Politicians are playing a real game of Monopoly with people’s lives and it makes me sad and angry.”
I was 13 years old when I caused the accidental death of a friend.
That’s the kind of sentence that stops people in their tracks and it should. I remember the silence that followed, not just from the world around me, but inside me. How do you move forward from something like that when you’re still just a kid yourself? I didn’t know how. No one did. I just kept waking up inside a body that felt like a prison and a world that no longer had a place for me.
There was no guidebook for a child who had taken a life, even by accident. No healing circle. No support group. Just isolation, shame, and eventually, prison. I wore my guilt like skin. And no matter where I went, school, the streets, a cell, I never felt like I belonged. Not to a community. Not to the future. Not even to myself.
I didn’t come into the program confident or put together. I came in broken. But Public Allies didn’t ask me to hide that. They didn’t shame me. They didn’t treat me like a case file. They treated me like a human being with potential, not just a past.
They gave me meaningful work and trusted me to lead. They handed me a mic when I thought I’d never have a voice. They sat with my story when others ran from it. Through service, I found healing. Through community, I found purpose. And for the first time in years, I felt something crack open: I didn’t want to die. I wanted to live.
Not survive. Live.
AmeriCorps didn’t save a version of me. It saved me. All of me.
Now, the government wants to shut it down. To some, that’s just a budget cut. To me, it feels like an attack on everything I’ve fought to become — on everyone like me who is out there right now, quietly losing hope. Waiting for someone to see them.
Because here’s the truth: not everyone has the same starting line. Some of us start with a tragedy that follows us like a shadow. Some of us grow up in systems that forget us until we fail. Some of us have never once been told, “You still matter.”
That’s what Public Allies did. It said, You still matter.
If you’ve never hated yourself so much that breathing felt like punishment, you may not understand what programs like this really do. They don’t just build résumés. They build lives. They don’t just reduce unemployment. They reduce despair.
Don’t let AmeriCorps die.
Because if you do, you’re not just cutting a line item. You’re cutting off lifelines. You’re killing the one place where someone like me can walk in with nothing but a story and walk out with a reason to keep going. I am one of the lucky ones. And I’m writing this because I know there’s someone else out there, on the edge, waiting to be seen.
Dana Goldstein has been reporting on education since 2007. May 10, 2025
What happened to learning as a national priority?
For decades, both Republicans and Democrats strove to be seen as champions of student achievement. Politicians believed pushing for stronger reading and math skills wasn’t just a responsibility, it was potentially a winning electoral strategy.
At the moment, though, it seems as though neither party, nor even a single major political figure, is vying to claim that mantle.
President Trump has been fixated in his second term on imposing ideological obedience on schools.
On the campaign trail, he vowed to “liberate our children from the Marxist lunatics and perverts who have infested our educational system.”Since taking office, he has pursued this goal with startling energy — assaulting higher education while adopting a strategy of neglect toward the federal government’s traditional role in primary and secondary schools. He has canceled federal exams that measure student progress, and ended efforts to share knowledge with schools about which teaching strategies lead to the best results. A spokeswoman for the administration said that low test scores justify cuts in federal spending. “What we are doing right now with education is clearly not working,” she said.
Mr. Trump has begun a bevy of investigations into how schools handle race and transgender issues, and has demanded that the curriculum be “patriotic” — a priority he does not have the power to enact, since curriculum is set by states and school districts.
None of it adds up to an agenda on learning.
Forty percent of students who start college do not graduate, often leaving with debt and few concrete skills.Credit…Alisha Jucevic for The New York Times
Democrats, for their part, often find themselves standing up for a status quo that seems to satisfy no one. Governors and congressional leaders are defending the Department of Education as Mr. Trump has threatened to abolish it. Liberal groups are suing to block funding cuts. When Kamala Harris was running for president last year, she spoke about student loan forgiveness and resisting right-wing book bans. But none of that amounts to an agenda on learning, either.
All of this is true despite the fact that reading scores are the lowest they have been in decades, after a pandemic that devastated children by shuttering their schools and sending them deeper and deeper into the realm of screens and social media. And it is no wonder Americans are increasingly cynical about higher education. Forty percent of students who start college do not graduate, often leaving with debt and few concrete skills.
“Right now, there are no education goals for the country,” said Arne Duncan, who served as President Barack Obama’s first secretary of education after running Chicago’s public school system. “There are no metrics to measure goals, there are no strategies to achieve those goals and there is no public transparency.”
Michael Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a center-right think tank, and a former education official under President George W. Bush, agreed. “There is no talk of achievement gaps, and little talk even of upward mobility or opportunity,” he said.
Vicious debates over critical race theory and D.E.I. have put education at the center of our politics. And yet, these conversations are so often indifferent to the data showing that when it comes to academic learning and socialdevelopment, too many children and teenagers are suffering.
But despite the lack of national direction, an energetic group of educators, parents and researchers is advancing an ambitious agenda for learning. It is centered around one big idea: The breadth, depth and quality of the curriculum matter.
How Education Reform Died
Many Americans will recall that on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush was in a second-grade classroom, smiling wanly as children read a book called “The Pet Goat.”
What they may not remember is why Mr. Bush was there, at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Fla., on that morning. Booker was — and is — an ordinary public school, which served mostly Black children from low-income families. The president was promoting No Child Left Behind, which he was struggling to get through Congress. It would eventually pass with bipartisan support, instituting a national program of annual standardized testing in reading and math.
While Mr. Obama critiqued how N.C.L.B. was carried out, he agreed with its core vision and advanced it. States were prodded to adopt the Common Core, a set of shared curriculum standards, which brought changes like more thesis-driven writing assignments and a greater emphasis on conceptual understanding in math.
In those years, Washington sought to hold educators accountable for raising students’ scores on tests linked to the new standards. Schools could be labeled “failing.” Teachers with low evaluation scores could even lose their tenure protections.
It worked, at least for a time. Achievement in reading and math increased, especially among the lowest-performing students. But tying punishments to test scores led to a predictable outcome: a curriculum that, in too many schools, centered on test prep. Students practiced reading short passages and answering multiple choice questions about those passages, over and over again. And with principals focused intently on raising scores in reading and math, they whittled away time for social studies and science.
All of this contributed to a potent anti-education-reform movement, led by teachers and parents. On the right, there was angry resistance to any kind of federal mandate over local schools. On the left, a vocal group of parents began to refuse standardized tests; in 2015, 20 percent of students in New York opted out of state exams.
When President Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act at the White House in 2015, it signaled the end of bipartisan education reform.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
The politics of top-down school accountability had become untenable. Later that year, Mr. Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act, largely unraveling his own education agenda. Bipartisan school reform was dead.
Since then, Republicans have embraced a free-market vision of parental rights, in which as many tax dollars as possible are freed to help parents pay for private-school tuition, home-schooling and for-profit virtual schooling. That movement accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic, when conservative parents organized to resist school closures, mask mandates and progressive ideas about race and gender in the curriculum, picking up support from some centrists and liberals along the way.
Over the past five years, the number of students using some form of private school voucher doubled, to more than 1 million. That number is expected to continue to grow quickly.
Voucher advocates once argued that school choice would move children into academically superior schools, as measured by test scores. Not any more. Now, their highest goods are parental control and satisfaction.
Over the same time period, Democrats drew closer to their traditional allies, the teachers’ unions. During the 1990s and early 2000s, the party had engaged in a constructive internal debate on whether to expand the number of public charter schools, an idea that Mr. Obama supported. Many charters were built around the conviction that poor children deserve an academically rigorous education — but they largely were not unionized. President Joe Biden, a staunch labor ally, marginalized the charter-school sector, despite the fact that it has created thousands of quality public schools.
Instead, Democrats focused on investing in teacher pay and improving school buildings. Progressives spoke frequently about schools as community centers filled with counselors and health clinics, and less frequently about reading comprehension or algebra.
Health and social supports — even nicer buildings — do help children learn. But as Democrats tried to address poverty and inequality, they sometimes minimized schools’ core functions of learning, socialization and child-care while parents work. This tendency contributed greatly to the party’s inaction in the face of the unions’ push for extended remote learning.
The public schools superintendent in Seattle, Brent Jones, whose system was closed for 18 months, has framed that period as, essentially, a triumph.
“I saw it as a forced opportunity to step back,” he said. “We were called upon, frankly, to expand our mission to include many other things: nutritional, social, emotional, mental health. There was a cry for support. Schools stepped into that gap.”
Maximizing Learning
In one classroom, in northeast Louisiana, you can see several ideas that have emerged far from the spotlight of national politics.
One recent afternoon at Highland Elementary School, where 70 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a diverse group of fifth-graders sat, rapt, as their teacher, Lauren Cascio, introduced a key insight: that the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and the Reformation all occurred during the same period of human history.
Ms. Cascio reviewed vocabulary words that students would need: heretic, rational, skepticism, heliocentric. Then, over the course of an hour, 10- and 11-year-olds broke into groups to discuss why Leonardo da Vinci was interested in human anatomy. They wrote about how the ideas of Copernicus and Galileo differed from those of the ancient Greeks.
Unlike in many elementary-school classrooms, the students did not have computers or tablets on their desks. They had open books, which they were avidly marking up with highlighters and pencils.
The work in Louisiana has been celebrated by the Knowledge Matters Campaign, an effort led by Barbara Davidson, a policy advocate and veteran of the Department of Education under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Ms. Davidson supported the goals of No Child Left Behind. That is why she feels a responsibility now to correct for that era’s excesses. Knowledge Matters tries to draw attention to schools that demonstrate strong reading results, often through teaching a notably rigorous, history-heavy curriculum to elementary school students.
Ms. Davidson has worked to amplify the ideas of a loosely organized network of educators, curriculum-writers, parents and local policymakers who are rejecting ideological approaches to education, and instead, are focused on how to maximize learning.
Students practice phonics at Panther Valley Elementary School in Nesquehoning, Pa.Credit…Hannah Yoon for The New York Times
It starts with reading. One positive development of the past decade has been a shift toward a research-backed focus on structured phonics in the early grades — to successful effect. But now, some of the attention has shifted to additional aspects of literacy instruction that are backed by cognitive science, and crucial for turning beginning readers into proficient ones; namely, the finding that to become a good reader, and thus a well-educated worker and citizen, children need a strong vocabulary and knowledge about the world. The subjects that best build vocabulary and knowledge are social studies and science — the exact subjects that the Bush-Obama reforms often stripped from the school day.
But students face an additional challenge that didn’t exist during the education battles of the 2000s: ubiquitous screens. Children cannot learn to focus their attention on books or anything else if they are constantly distracted by addictive technology. The push to ban phones in schools transcends partisanship, and parent activism has helped a dozen states ban or limit cellphones in schools. Still, many educators say that screens remain a problem.
About 90 percent of schools now provide a computer or tablet for every student, up from 45 percent before the pandemic. It is common for children as young as 8 to spend an hour or more of the school day staring at screens.
Some teachers are moving in-class reading and writing back to paper. Among them is Jon Gold, a middle school history teacher in Providence, R.I., who frequently writes on how to enrich the curriculum and use technology in smarter ways. He now requires his students to close their laptops and read on paper. “Their reading comprehension is stronger,” he said.
The push to emphasize learning is not just about the liberal arts, though. Developing a mature attention span is also crucial for work. The previous generation of education reformers sought to enroll as many students as possible in four-year colleges. In many ways, the standard-bearer was the KIPP network of charter schools, whose mantra was “college starts in kindergarten.”
The bachelor’s degree still accelerates lifetime earnings, and KIPP leaders still encourage students to strive for it. But given the persistence of high college dropout rates and the burden of student debt, KIPP teachers and counselors are increasingly open to students pursuing remunerative career paths that do not require a four-year degree — think electrical installation, HVAC specialists and radiography technicians.
High schools need much more help on this from employers and government, many educators say — establishing apprenticeships that allow teenagers to learn in real work places, and collecting data on what types of vocational programs are most rigorous, as measured by a track record of landing graduates in decently paid jobs.
The Politics of Learning
Satisfaction with public education is at a quarter-century low, and enrollment in public schools has declined since the pandemic. According to polls, concerns about the curriculum are one reason. But large majorities of voters are enthusiastic about schools doing a better job at teaching the core academic subjects and civics, as well as introducing more work force training. So why aren’t politicians responding to voters’ concerns when it comes to learning?
Some elected officials — especially younger ones — are.
Satisfaction with public education is at a quarter-century low, and enrollment in public schools has declined since the pandemic.Credit…Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
Jake Auchincloss, a House Democrat from the Boston suburbs, has urged his party to apologize for pandemic school closures. He has advanced a number of proposals to more heavily regulate and tax social media companies, and has said the money should be used to provide every public school student in America one-on-one tutoring.
On the Republican side, Senator Tom Cotton, like Mr. Trump, wants to tax elite university endowments, which he argues are not serving most American students. He envisions using the money to finance a $9,000 voucher for high school graduates pursuing workplace apprenticeships, and to offer incentives to companies to hire those trainees into permanent jobs.
The country is deeply polarized. But a survey of some of the most exciting work happening in schools shows that educators and parents have the ability to embrace new ideas and come together around the goal of giving the next generation a quality education. It could even be the beginning of a political platform.
Until I reached a kid-having age, I might have guessed that the priciest child-related expense was diapers. This was based on a blissful ignorance of parenting math that can be found only in the childfree — and in high school conversations with some girls who volunteered at a crisis pregnancy center. “We make it easy for the moms to choose life,” one told me. “Because the moms don’t have to pay for diapers.”M
Did diapers cost a dollar apiece? Five bucks? Seventeen? Less or more than Harvard? Who could say!
I can. I can say now. Huggies cost $45 for a big pack of 148. You’ll go through a few of those every month until your kid is 2½ or 3. Add on another $1,500 for wipes, rash creams, bum butters, diaper pails, etc. It all totals up to $4,500-ish to keep your baby and your furniture dry until they’re potty-trained, which makes the Trump administration’s theoretical $5,000 baby incentive — one of several ideas the administration is apparently considering to boost flagging birth rates — seem like a great deal.
For several years, conservatives have been fretting about the declining American birth rate. Elon Musk is trying to solve the problem exclusively with his own DNA. But now, here comes the White House with a vague list of solutions: $5,000 provided to every American mother after delivery. Classes educating women on their menstrual cycles. One prominent “pronatalist” couple apparently sent the White House a few of their own ideas, including a “National Medal of Motherhood” for women who birth six or more children. “Sounds like a good idea to me,” President Donald Trump said of the baby bonus, while White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the president was “proudly implementing policies to uplift American families.”
So the only question left to ask is: Jesus, have any of these policy wonks ever had to actually budget for a baby?
Five thousand dollars is a large sum of money. Five thousand dollars, in the grand financial scheme of child-rearing, is nothing. It’s a fart-in-the-wind number; it disappears before you even registered it was coming. Formula. Clothes. Strollers. Amoxicillin. My family has good health insurance, and while waiting for the deductible to kick in, I still spent $835 at the pediatrician last year.
We’re not even to the expensive stuff yet. Where I live, day care costs an average of $24,000 a year. Advocacy group Child Care Aware estimated in 2023 that “center-based infant care costs more per year than in-state tuition at a public university in 34 states and the District of Columbia.” There’s a reason that study after study, from both conservative and liberal think tanks, estimates that raising a child from birth to adulthood costs at least a quarter of a million dollars.
So let’s not get confused. A proposed $5,000 is not enough to uplift an American family. And it’s downright perverse when the money is being floated by the same administration that seems hell-bent on making parenthood harder in almost every conceivable way.
Five thousand dollars — from the same administration that provided $1 billion less in funding this year to Head Start, a program that provides free preschool for low-income families. Five thousand dollars — from the same administration trying to close the federal day-care centers that make it possible for thousands of parents to work.
Five thousand dollars from the same administration that recently slashed maternal health programs at the Department of Health and Human Services. That fired the entire staff of a program designed to help struggling families keep their utilities running. That cut $660 million in funding that allowed schools to purchase food from local farms to feed kids. That wants to dismantle the Department of Education. In a March news release titled “President Trump is protecting America’s children,” the White House promised that the president would “never stop fighting for [children’s] right to a healthy, productive upbringing and childhood,” but then four of the five touted bullet points had to do with transgender issues, such as “President Trump made it the official policy of the U.S. government that there are only two sexes.”
I feel like a crank and an ingrate belaboring these numbers. “Something is better than nothing” is the credo by which I live my life. If you don’t have time to go to the gym, walking for 10 minutes is better than sitting on the couch. If you forgot to send someone’s birthday gift, a phone call is better than silence. If American families are drowning in a sea of child-related expenses, then sending them home with $5,000 is better than sending them home with no-thousand dollars. Nobody expects the government to pay for all of their child care — after all, this isn’t Canada, South Korea, Japan or basically anywhere in Europe where people do, in fact, expect the government to heavily subsidize child care and the government happily obliges.
The real issue here isn’t that this administration doesn’t seem to understand math. The real issue is that this administration, which purports to love families, does not seem to understand children.
It does not seem to understand them as whole people who need not only $5,000 worth of supplies upon birth, but also two decades worth of care and attention to follow. In terms of education. In terms of nutritious food. In terms of swimming lessons, birthday parties, and the ability to travel to a farm or a city or the Atlantic Ocean and think, Wow, this is my country, and it is big, and it is beautiful.
What is a mother supposed to do when her electricity is about to be shut off, and the program that could have helped her pay it is gone, and she can’t go to work to get electricity-bill money because there’s nobody to watch her kids because the good day cares are shuttered and even the bad ones cost more than her hourly wage? Hawk her National Medal of Motherhood on eBay?
And we’re to believe that a main factor in the declining birth rate is that women … don’t know how their periods work?
I learned about the $5,000 proposal from one of my favorite regular readers. He and I agree on almost nothing, but I respect him a lot, and he regularly challenges me to find “something positive” to say about the Trump administration. Surely, he said, I could find something positive to say about an idea that would put $5,000 in the pockets of new moms. Surely the White House and I have this in common.
So yes. I would love for new moms to have $5,000 in their pockets. But I would love even more for the White House to be smarter than I was as a high-school-age girl. Because what we should want is not an uptick in babies that we can promise to keep in Huggies but a generation of kids whom we want to invest in way past birth.
Having a child is an act of hope and faith, as the Trump administration well knows. We do have that belief in common. Having a child requires the hope that from the moment you see the second line of the pregnancy test, you are bringing them into the world because it is good to be brought into this world. And that at the moment you drive away from their freshman dorm or their first apartment, you will know that they made the world better and that the world made them better, too. It’s hard to put a price tag on that. It’s hard to do it by yourself.
Don Bacon, a Republican, represents Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District in the U.S. House. He co-chairs the bipartisan National Service Congressional Caucus.
As a small-government conservative who supports a leaner and more efficient federal bureaucracy, I have cheered President Donald Trump’s efforts to identify and eliminate fraud and waste in Washington. We’ve been spending ourselves into oblivion and getting remarkably little in return.M
But there’s a difference between common-sense cuts to underperforming or bloated agencies and haphazardly eliminating every program a software engineer fails to appreciate, as the U.S. DOGE Service, or Department of Government Efficiency, is attempting with national service.
AmeriCorps has been one of the most effective public service initiatives of the post-Vietnam era. It allows young Americans to serve their country — many for the first time — through efforts ranging from disaster recovery and food-bank staffing to teaching and tutoring students and supporting our veterans and senior citizens. The program fosters civic pride, develops life-changing job skills and strengthens communities in every corner of this country.
I was honored to serve for nearly 30 years in the U.S. Air Force, and I recognize that not everyone is suited for the military. But many of those patriotic Americans still wish to contribute to our country. AmeriCorps is a way to do that.
These young men and women don’t serve for accolades or headlines — they simply believe in making a difference. And their work, often behind the scenes, brings hope and practical support to thousands of Americans every day. AmeriCorps is national service at its best: voluntary, community-based, impactful and efficient.
If DOGE were genuinely focused on creating a more efficient federal government, it would model everything on AmeriCorps. Unlike most federal agencies, AmeriCorps is almost exclusively directed by state governors, who are always better positioned than Washington to decide where and how to spend and deploy resources. It is a public-private partnership that marries nominal federal investment with matching private contributions. Every federal tax dollar invested in its programs generates a $17 return to society at large through increased earning potential (both by AmeriCorps members and those they serve) and reduced reliance on state and federal government support.
I know of no other federal agency that generates that kind of taxpayer return on investment through positive, measurable outcomes. For these reasons, I am profoundly troubled by the recent wave of national service cuts directed by DOGE.
Not only are we stripping Americans of a chance to serve, but the communities these services support are left scrambling. Teach for America, Habitat for Humanity, City Year, Boys and Girls Clubs, Big Brothers Big Sisters — each of their budgets, workforce and impact will be gutted by these cuts. At the same time, disaster response efforts and AmeriCorps Senior programs that connect senior volunteers with second-act opportunities, including foster grandparents and senior companion programs, are similarly being shut down. These cuts are being implemented without a clear strategy — just an arbitrary push to meet a numeric goal.
It’s a sledgehammer approach when a scalpel is what’s needed.
We can and should focus on eliminating waste, but we must also protect what works. AmeriCorps is not a bloated bureaucracy — it’s a lean, high-return investment in service, leadership and community resilience. With every dollar spent, the return in lives changed and communities improved is undeniable.
At a time when division dominates our headlines, AmeriCorps brings people together around a common purpose. That’s something worth preserving.
I urge my colleagues and the administration to pause and consider the long-term implications of these decisions. If we want to build a stronger nation, we must continue supporting service, not sidelining it.
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