NYT June 6th Zach Montague
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/05/us/politics/judge-reinstatement-americorps-programs.html