Altruism, and Tighter Rules

Just before leaving for summer recess, GOP leaders tried to zero out nearly $420 million in funding for the agency that runs AmeriCorps, the community service program President Bill Clinton helped create in 1993. AmeriCorps is a good idea that shouldn’t die just because it wasn’t always perfectly executed.

The program, a sort of domestic version of the Peace Corps, gives participants about $9,000 in living expenses for a year of helping the needy--tutoring at-risk youth, for example, and helping out in homeless shelters. It’s also a key source of income for many faith-based programs, including Habitat for Humanity.

Nevertheless, AmeriCorps has been a perennial target of congressional conservatives, partly because of its association with Clinton but also because it has been hobbled since its inception by poor record-keeping (its own inspector general documented cases in which recruits received grants for working at McDonald’s or while in prison) and by murky visions of how it should help the needy. One volunteer said program organizers told her “she could count baby-sitting, lifeguarding and choir practice as AmeriCorps volunteerism.”

An arguable strength of AmeriCorps--decentralization that allows communities to implement their own solutions--also is an obvious weakness, barring federal regulators from imposing a rigid top-down notion of how to best serve the needy.

Last year, an independent audit of the corporation concluded that it “has made notable progress in achieving its goals of improved financial management.”

Still, congressional Republicans skeptical of the program are right to suggest that continued funding be tied to better accountability. For as a study of AmeriCorps last year by two Indiana University professors, Leslie Lenkowsky and James L. Perry, concluded, “even reinvented agencies must adhere to some generally accepted principles of American public administration. Budgets must be balanced, accounting practices performed, merit rules honored.”

Tying continued funding of AmeriCorps to better accountability is far preferable to gutting the program outright. In an age when altruism seems in short supply, its goal is worth striving toward.