Americorps Is a Dangerous Trojan Horse

Going bananas

Not too long ago—sometime around 2019, to the best of my recollection—Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan duct-taped a banana to a wall and called it art.

A lot of people took him seriously. The “art” ultimately sold for $120,000, and replicas have since sold for much more. Cattelan titled the piece Comedian, which, come to think of it, tells you all you need to know.

Still, the episode provoked a surprisingly controversial debate about what art even is these days. For many observers, the banana came to symbolize the absurdities of modern art: an everyday piece of produce, summarily aggrandized, defended pretentiously, and paid for with absurd sums of money.

Sometimes the buyers even ate the damn things. Pagans, obviously.

If I didn’t know better—and frankly I don’t—I’d say Wisconsin Democratic Assembly minority leader Greta Neubauer (D-Racine) is a huge fan of Cattelan’s work. Or of the banana-on-the-wall method of artistic creation, at least as it applies to politics. That’s because, this past week, Neubauer engaged in her own version of banana art: the now-common progressive practice of hurling outrageous policy proposals against the wall and hoping something sticks, duct-tape or no.

Each and every progressive proposal, it seems, is as banal as a banana. The hat trick for Democrats is to hope no one notices just how unserious their proposals actually are, while still persuading taxpayers to pay enormous sums to implement them.

For Neubauer—let’s flip the script and call her Comedian—the banana this week was her proposal to create a Wisconsin Climate Corps. It was the latest symbol of the absurdities of modern progressivism, and it is almost certainly doomed as legislation.

Passing it is not really the point, though.

The point is to virtue-signal to the progressive base, to telegraph what Democrats are doing behind the scenes, and to promise that all the bureaucratic betrayals of democratic accountability going on behind those scenes will be copied wholesale into statute the moment banana republicans, otherwise known as Democrats, regain power in the legislature.

Her bill is pure performance, in other words: banana art.

More significant is what the Democrats are otherwise doing. In a separate, perhaps coordinated announcement, Governor Tony Evers revealed that Wisconsin had received $9.3 million in new AmeriCorps grant funding.

Evers and Serve Wisconsin, Americorp’s governing board in the state, plan to scatter those dollars across roughly 20 AmeriCorps programs statewide, funding what they describe as “critical programming,” including youth and after-school services, early literacy, college preparation, math tutoring, classroom support, conservation projects, and habitat restoration.

On paper, this all sounds too good to be true. Who, except knee-knocking right-wingers, could object to tutoring kids, restoring habitats, clearing trails, or helping communities connect with services?

But look a little closer. What Evers actually announced was far from community-friendly or even benign. What he announced was the funneling of taxpayer dollars to left-wing ideological organizations, many of them explicitly political, to spread progressive fervor among youth and in poorer communities that are more susceptible to ideological capture.

Much of that money will no doubt be directed to “environmental education,” programs that would have been included in Neubauer’s proposed Climate Corps, which itself would almost certainly be modeled on the now-defunct American Climate Corps (ACC), which President Donald Trump terminated earlier this year precisely because of its ideological biases.

The ACC was designed to fuse progressive climate activism, workforce training, and community volunteerism into a single, taxpayer-funded pipeline of boots-on-the-ground radicalization. So while on paper Neubauer’s Climate Corps proposal and Evers’s AmeriCorps announcement appear unrelated, in reality they were twin expressions of the same strategy: use the rhetoric and cloak of community service to advance an illegitimate ideological invasion from within.

Neubauer’s legislative ploy was merely an attempt to make the reality of bureaucratic subterfuge sound more like a rescue mission than the bootleg arrogation it really is.

Just asking questions

Earlier this year, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) attempted to defund AmeriCorp, only to be blocked by activist judges. Ultimately, more than $185 million in taxpayer funds were released to continue promoting its left-wing propaganda, and Wisconsin’s $9.3 million slice of the pie will place nearly 700 AmeriCorps members across roughly 200 service sites statewide.

Many of them will be up to no good.

The best way to understand AmeriCorps is to think of it as a present wrapped in shiny paper, offered by an imposter whom you think you know. The wrapping—the visible service work—is glittery and virtuous. It’s the poser’s way to get inside the house. The surprise gift inside is indoctrination carried quietly and lethally into communities under the pretense of help.

It’s a Trojan horse waiting for you to go to bed.

Or, to put it another way, AmeriCorps functions like terrorists using hostages as human shields. If you destroy us, the terrorists scream, you’ll also kill the innocents around us. Here, the posers cry, if you defund us, you’ll dismantle not just our propaganda machine but all those other good things we do. Criticize us, they say, and you’re attacking literacy programs, conservation work, and disaster relief. Shut us down, and you’re harming innocent people.

All of which is so much bunk. Programs can be separated from ideology just as wheat can be separated from chaff. Wisconsin counties learned this lesson years ago with the University of Wisconsin Extension. For years, defenders insisted that dismantling its ideologically biased climate “education” programs would also destroy programs like 4-H. Counties eventually learned they could save 4-H—and cut the offending rot.

The same principle applies here.

Still, I can see eyes roll and faces grimace over such harsh judgments. After all, this is a program whose members helped save corn snakes—yes, they really did that, whatever corn snakes are—and that partners with programs like Big Brothers & Big Sisters. Good things do get done with AmeriCorps.

The problem is, AmeriCorps does not operate in isolation. One of its own Big Brothers turns out to be Big Government. AmeriCorps, like the ACC, is not merely a volunteer coordination program. It is a grant-making, ideologically-weaponized arm of the administrative state, operating under the comforting banner of “helping communities” while quietly transforming those communities into long-term political assets. Or into sleeper cells of globalist disciples, if you are not inclined to be polite.

This is important: None of this is speculation or right-wing rant. It is their own stated mission.

AmeriCorps’ own annual management plans make clear that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is not an optional add-on but a core organizing principle and that progressive policy priorities are foremost on its agenda.

“AmeriCorps has a decades-long commitment to advancing racial and economic equity through national service and volunteering,” the AmeriCorps 2024 annual management report states. “These efforts are designed to expand pathways to opportunity for all Americans. Racial and economic equity will be central to AmeriCorps’ planning and implementation of all priorities, ensuring AmeriCorps members and volunteers reflect the diversity of the American people and the communities in which they serve.”

In the 2023 AmeriCorps annual management report (which seems to have disappeared from their website, though I have it), the group’s CEO reported that “AmeriCorps members and AmeriCorps Seniors volunteers helped communities tackle their most pressing challenges, including addressing public health needs, preparing students for success in school, responding to natural disasters, supporting veterans and military families, preserving public lands, addressing climate change, and advancing racial and economic equity.”

That’s not all. The 2023 report (likewise vanquished from the website, no doubt due to “funding cuts”) said AmeriCorps volunteers and workers were on the frontlines of major social upheavals.

“Despite ongoing unprecedented and interlocking challenges such as public health crises, major upheavals in the economy, a national reckoning on racial inequity centuries in the making, tragedies from hate-fueled violence, more frequent and intense extreme weather events, and increased social isolation and divides, AmeriCorps showed up for communities most in need by providing people power, funding, and resources,” the report stated.

So let’s see, they are arming the revolution, at least figuratively and ideologically. That would be the revolution against you and me and the constitution, funded by our own money.

What’s more, the agency has declared that it will weave DEI into the very tissue of its existence. In April 2022, AmeriCorps released an Equity Action Plan “reinforcing its commitment to advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility and embedding it into the fabric of the agency,” the 2022 annual management report boasted.

“AmeriCorps established an Office of DEIA, hired the agency’s first Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, and continued to invest in supporting underserved communities,” the report stated. “AmeriCorps is dedicated to creating structural and lasting change in AmeriCorps’ grantmaking, workplace, and recruitment of a corps that reflects the diversity and lived experiences of the communities they serve.”

The key to a DEI progressive future was in its grassroots community work, the report stated:

“Service holds the power to transform lives and tackle some of our nation’s most pressing issues, including alleviating poverty, advancing racial equity, combatting the growing threat of climate change, uniting Americans across divides, and building a more inclusive and equitable future for all.”

No, this is not your grandma’s banana, duct-taped innocently to the wall.

While today’s woke agenda is obvious to anyone paying attention, it has actually been baked into AmeriCorps since its creation in the early 1990s under the National and Community Service Trust Act. The original rhetoric was not so obvious as those recent management plans. Instead, they preached not about equity and collective identity but about renewing civic responsibility and encouraging individual volunteerism.

The truth is, though, even that noble rhetoric helped to undermine community values. It masked the fact that genuine volunteerism does not require a federal bureaucracy. That it did was a lie peddled from the beginning. It was the very top of a long slippery slope.

Americans volunteered long before AmeriCorps existed. Churches, veterans’ groups, fraternal organizations, and civic groups fulfilled needs in the community, often more efficiently and humanely than government ever could. AmeriCorps did not arise because Americans stopped caring. It arose because Washington decided even volunteerism needed to be centralized, bureaucratized, and ideologically controlled. Over time, AmeriCorps evolved into a sprawling grant machine, dispensing billions to nonprofits, schools, and advocacy groups that increasingly shared an allegiance to a globalist anti-constitutional world order.

That allegiance is no longer beneath the surface.

Not racist? Not good enough

Conservative critics have long warned that while AmeriCorps members often perform useful work, the organization’s infrastructure functions as a left-wing pipeline. Workers are trained in radical networking and in promoting partisan agendas before transitioning into influential positions in the nonprofit and government sectors.

For one, the Center for Renewing America (CRA) has documented how AmeriCorps training explicitly teaches DEI concepts that cast Western institutions as inherently oppressive. The CRA points to AmeriCorps’ partners such as Public Allies, which it says teaches corps members that it is insufficient to be “not racist” or “against racism”; they must become “anti-racist.”

“For example, a participant who signed up to serve in the Dallas Independent School District recounted a ‘privilege line exercise’ she and other corps members had to do as part of their DEI training to determine who was more privileged based on their skin color and wealth,” the March 2025 CRA report stated.

What’s more, the report continued, AmeriCorps job listings include projects such as identifying gay-straight alliance groups and their status within area schools to curate a resource database for youth, creating DEI youth training videos for “family planning” centers, and developing a training curriculum for professionals and volunteers serving LGBT youth.

Put simply, the woke agenda has been incorporated at every level.

“The following is a list of DEI initiatives funded by AmeriCorps,” the report stated. “The CivicSpark program, an AmeriCorps initiative in California, developed a Racial Equity Action Plan that included budgeting for an environmental justice curriculum. This plan emphasized the importance of decolonizing fellows’ understanding of the environmental movement by ensuring recognition of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) leadership and issues within the environmental and climate movement.”

In 2020, the report continued, California volunteers introduced the AmeriCorps Racial Justice Planning Grant Funding Opportunity.

“This initiative provided planning grants ranging from $25,000 to $75,000 to organizations aiming to develop AmeriCorps programs focused on tackling community problems disproportionately affecting communities of color,” the report stated. “This is a scheme to provide funding on the basis of race, which recent Court decisions have said is unconstitutional. Further, it exacerbates discrimination in the long run.”

AmeriCorps-funded projects not only map LGBTQ advocacy networks in schools and create DEI curricula for youth but also embed environmental justice narratives into conservation work.

Financially, the picture is no better. AmeriCorps failed its eighth consecutive audit in November 2024, earning a “disclaimer of opinion” that signals unreliable financial records, the CRA report stated: “Furthermore, the audit uncovered 11 material weaknesses and two significant deficiencies in AmeriCorps’ financial management.”

In 2023, the House Education Workforce Committee highlighted a “Management Challenges” report issued by the AmeriCorps Office of Inspector General, the CRA reported. According to that report, the agency failed to “demonstrate adequate knowledge and understanding of Federal accounting standards, financial reporting requirements, and effective financial management practices.”

The OIA report also spotlighted lack of grant oversight:

The management challenges report also found that falsified timesheets had an accounting impact because any fraudulent awards based on falsified timesheets were overstatements of liabilities to AmeriCorps.

“One of our investigations found University of North Carolina and East Carolina University AmeriCorps programs falsely certified member timesheets that included hours claimed to be served on holidays and weekends, excessive hours claimed towards the end of school years, and 16-hour service days which were beyond available service site hours,” the report stated. “The universities paid a combined $515,000 to settle the false claims allegations related to the timesheets in question.”

Meanwhile, back at Evers’s ranch …

With all this already reported, Wisconsin’s lawmakers should be asking hard questions of the governor and others who support this program. The first would be why they aren’t already asking the hard questions themselves.

Specifically, for what purposes will the $9.3 million be used? Where exactly is this money going? Who is making the decisions? What will be the accountability?

Let’s take a look at some of those Wisconsin partner organizations that are getting ready for the loot.

One of them, Public Allies Wisconsin, a major AmeriCorps partner, openly describes itself as a social justice organization committed to creating “a just and equitable society.” Its website states:

Another partner organization is the Milwaukee Justice Center, which states that its AmeriCorps members “are crucial in advancing access to justice and building a stronger, more equitable community.” Teach For America AmeriCorps members are described as “growing and strengthening the movement for educational equity…”

The bottom line is, by placing ideologically trained workers into schools, nonprofits, legal aid centers, conservation projects, and local governments, AmeriCorps seeds progressive assumptions at the ground level. Its radically tinted lenses are presented as transparent glass windows. Participants then graduate into leadership positions, advocacy organizations, and government agencies to further advance the discoloration of reality.

Finally, let’s take a look at some of Serve Wisconsin’s board members. Serve Wisconsin’s own board includes individuals deeply embedded in progressive leadership networks, equity activism, and ideological training organizations.

There’s a coterie of Evers’ administration officials, so we automatically know the woke deal with them: Amanda Dederich, ex officio designee for DHS secretary Kirsten Johnson; Leah Moore, ex officio designee for adjutant general Paul Knapp; and Richard Rydecki, designee for DOA secretary Kathy Blumenfeld.

There’s a business representative, Luke Fuszard. This is how his own campaign website described him when he was running for Middleton common council: “He was a founding member of the Wisconsin chapter of the New Leaders Council, a progressive training organization. He now serves as the chair of the Advisory Board, which engages progressive leaders in fostering a new generation of young people interested in public service, running for office, or leading community organizations.”

That’s tailor made for what AmeriCorps has in mind, isn’t it?

But my favorite is Yolanda Shelton-Morris, a former AmeriCorps program officer. On LinkedIn, she describes herself this way, in addition to being a “professional organizer,” another key skill for infiltrating communities:

And her defining identity?

Over and over, through its board members words and in its partners’ mission statements, equity, social justice, collectivity, and progressive activism stand out. There is no role anywhere for conservatism, no room for individual liberty, the Constitution, accountability, personal responsibility, or equality of opportunity.

And that’s a big, big problem. AmeriCorps is not about service. It is about state-sponsored activism, propaganda financed by taxpayers who are never asked whether they consent to the ideology being spread in their name.

Wisconsin should not expand this model. It should eliminate it aggressively. This might be the ultimate in banana politics, but we’re just as bananas if we let it continue.