E&W Blog

America’s national debt is more than $36 trillion. That’s an unsustainable and unacceptable problem. Thankfully, on January 20, President Trump, Elon Musk, and Vivek Ramaswamy will get to work improving government efficiency and cutting wasteful spending. Today’s hearing, chaired by Rep. Burgess Owens (R-UT), highlighted a program that should certainly be on the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) chopping block: AmeriCorps.

This federal program receives more than $1 billion in taxpayer funds every year, and yet, it has failed eight audits in a row. As Rep. Owens put it in his opening statement, AmeriCorps “has a long history of abusing taxpayer dollars,” and “continuously fails to meet basic accountability standards.”
 

 

Other Members wasted no time pointing out those abuses and the lack of accountability. Questioning the AmeriCorps Chief Executive Officer, Michael Smith, Rep. Glenn “GT” Thompson (R-PA) highlighted the problematic lack of transparency when it comes to reporting outcomes for those who participate in the program. 

“One of the other challenges I see with AmeriCorps is the lack of transparency in reporting on what happens with youth following their participation in the program. As you likely know, most other federal education programs track student progress following their completion. I’m particularly concerned about this since it makes it difficult to assess, for example, credentials or hard skills that AmeriCorps participants…receive.”

Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) pressed the Inspector General, Stephen Ravas, on time card fraud, a widespread problem that the IG has uncovered at many AmeriCorps grantees’ sites as participants seek to earn monetary awards that can be applied to postsecondary education expenses. 

“Essentially, in order to earn a Segal Education Award, a member has to serve a certain threshold – an amount of time… In terms of fraud, we are seeing some programs where the programs are not monitoring the actual amount served, and the times on those time cards is not correct, and therefore individuals are earning educational awards that they shouldn’t,” Ravas testified.

 

Unfortunately, a lack of reported outcomes and time card fraud were just the tip of the iceberg. Rep. Bob Good (R-VA) had specific questions for the Inspector General, Stephen Ravas, about the balance of AmeriCorps’ trust fund and potential violations of the Anti-Deficiency Act, which prohibits agencies from spending money that Congress has not appropriated. At the end of fiscal year 2024, the AmeriCorps trust fund was in the red by more than $60 million, and it took several days to rectify the error. 

“Sir, how can a federal agency spend money that Congress didn’t give it?” Rep. Good probed. 

While AmeriCorps’ general counsel has claimed the situation did not violate the Anti-Deficiency Act, the IG cited a lack of internal controls for financial management as the cause of the mistake, and that – once again – highlights the major, systemic issues with the program. “At a minimum, this is horrible accounting of taxpayer funds,” Rep. Good said. “[AmeriCorps] is just another example of money we don’t have doing something [the federal government] shouldn’t be doing with forced confiscation of federal tax dollars.”
 

 

Speaking of things the federal government “shouldn’t be doing,” Rep. Owens had an addition to that list: diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. He had pointed questions about how AmeriCorps’ emphasis on DEI was distracting AmeriCorps from addressing the systemic financial problems the program has faced since 2017. 

“How does indoctrinating employees on DEI and integrating DEI into grants help address waste and fraud that we’ve been seeing all this time?” he asked.

“We’re proud of the work that we’ve done on diversity, equity and inclusion,” Smith responded. 

Chairwoman Foxx had some thoughts about that. “You’re proud of some strange things,” she said to Smith before she continued to press for answers on a multimillion dollar contract to update AmeriCorps’ IT systems. That contract has ballooned to nearly double its projected estimate in what Chairwoman Foxx called “incompetence” at a program that she dubbed “the poster child for waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government.” 

Rep. Owens concluded the hearing by pointing out the obvious: with $36 trillion in national debt, every single federal program needs to be evaluated based on the ROI it provides the taxpayers. “It’s nice to have programs that have a nice mission statement, but at the end of the day, we need data. This is real dollars from real people, investing in our government thinking we’re going to get a return on investment.” It can’t simply be about “feeling good…it’s getting the type of things we need to get done here, done.”