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Does AmeriCorps Work?

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from: Doug Bandow
to: Harris Wofford

Posted Tuesday, Dec. 7, 1999, at 3:30 AM ET

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a columnist for Copley News Service, and the author of The Politics of Envy: Statism as Theology (click here to buy it). Harris Wofford is a former senator from Pennsylvania and the current CEO of the Corporation for National Service, the agency that administers the AmeriCorps program.

Few programs have begun with the good intentions of AmeriCorps. Who can be against service?

There is, however, good reason to doubt the value of government-paid service. The practical implementation has been problematic. The principle, that government should steer the so-called independent sector, is even more flawed.

In October, AmeriCorps hosted a party to celebrate its fifth anniversary. The program doesn't deserve a sixth. Earlier this year, the inspector general of the Corporation for National Service (CNS), the agency that administers AmericaCorps, cited eight areas of operation as "materially weak: financial management and reporting, the Corporation's general control environment, grants management, financial systems, the National Service Trust, fund balance with Treasury, net position reporting, and inadequate procedures to properly record and report revenue from reimbursable agreements." Quite a list.

Obviously, private charities can suffer similar problems. But then it is not the taxpayers' money, forcibly diverted from other, better uses, which is being wasted. Moreover, private donors can cut off an organization like the United Way, forcing it to reform. Auditors have been unsuccessfully pointing to the Corporation's problems for years.

Symptomatic is this year's National Community Service Conference, held at the Caesar's Palace Hotel in Las Vegas. CNS sent 115 employees and 27 consultants, who were joined by more than 760 employees of CNS grantees. There's nothing wrong with holding a conference in a nice hotel in a nice city. But it is a dubious use of taxpayer dollars, collected in the name of serving society.

Unfortunately, grantees have exhibited similar problems. The CNS had to suspend a program at Ivy Tech State College in Terre Haute, Ind., because of nearly $300,000 in questionable costs. Two relatives of the former AmeriCorps program director collected their stipends while providing no record of any work performed. Participants received service credit for attending team practice, baby-sitting, singing in the church choir, and working as a lifeguard. Worthy activities, I suppose, but hardly worthy of taxpayer support.

And while many AmeriCorps participants do meaningful service, it is hard to know for certain how many. Last year, the inspector general warned of "irregularities, including fraud, in the reporting of AmeriCorps service hours."

Indeed, turning something as ambiguous as service into a political program invites abuse. Derrick Max, former lead investigator of the House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, points to: "high costs ($26,000 per AmeriCorps participant), high dropout rates (almost 30 percent), questionable training (sex education, video presentation skills, diversity), poor accounting and management oversight (unauditable accounts), wasteful spending ($400,000 to the AFL-CIO for 'training and technical assistance'), and questionable partisan political activities (raising money, handing out fliers, voter registration, etc.)." One should hope for better from the $3 billion spent so far.

There is a more basic issue, however. Should Uncle Sam take a senior management position in the service business? This goal goes back at least a century to Looking Backward, a novel by Edward Bellamy which envisioned a utopia resulting from mandatory service for everyone between the ages of 21 and 45. Two decades later, William James advocated the "moral equivalent of war," in which young men would be conscripted. A Potomac Institute study declared 20 years ago that "international comparisons," including Mao's China and Castro's Cuba, "also fire some American imaginations." Some members thought mandatory service would combat "Saturday-night-fever, unemployment, the new narcissism, and other afflictions of American youth."

Of course, AmeriCorps' aims are much more modest. Nevertheless, the program raises the question: service to and organized by whom?

Americans have volunteered in their communities since the nation's founding, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted in Democracy in America. And so it continues today. Three-quarters of American households give to charity. Some 90 million adults volunteer. It would be great if people did more, of course. But service in America is vital precisely because it is voluntary, decentralized, shaped to meeting personal rather than political needs and a natural outgrowth of people's compassion and sense of duty. Government funding threatens this rich heritage of voluntary service.

There are many reasons to fear the subtle corrupting impact of federal funding. However, perhaps my biggest concern is that AmeriCorps is discouraging one of the most important forms of service: donating to good causes.

As the welfare state has grown, public programs have steadily supplanted private charities. There are a number of reasons for this, including the perception that care for the poor is primarily the government's, not the individual's, duty.

Now Washington is saying that the provision of funding for nominally private charities is also the government's responsibility. Although it might seem simpler to have the IRS empty people's pockets than to have charities ask (or beg) for the same money, doing so sacrifices something very important. One of our most important moral responsibilities is to give wisely to aid those in need. Making other people write checks through the tax system is no substitute.

Service is good. Alas, the kind of government-paid service embodied in AmeriCorps is not.


dialogues
entries
123456
from: Doug Bandow
to: Harris Wofford

Posted Tuesday, Dec. 7, 1999, at 3:30 AM ET
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Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a columnist for Copley News Service, and the author of The Politics of Envy: Statism as Theology (click here to buy it). Harris Wofford is a former senator from Pennsylvania and the current CEO of the Corporation for National Service, the agency that administers the AmeriCorps program.
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