AmeriCorps Survived. Its Financial Problems Did, Too.

Surprise, surprise, AmeriCorps lives!

Oh, the irony.

Almost since the beginning of his second term, Donald Trump and his administration have been aggressively trying to dismantle AmeriCorps—the once-and-maybe-still far-left boots-on-the-ground operation that everybody likes to pretend is serving a legitimate American interest—but a multi-state legal challenge has resulted in a September settlement protecting funding and operations through early 2027.

Now there’s a legitimate separation-of-powers argument inside that lawsuit, and I’m not prepared to say this one was a flawed outcome. Congress appropriated the money, and an administration cannot generally dismantle or withhold appropriated funds simply because the president dislikes it. Even a president named Donald Trump.

To be sure, conservatives were rightly irked when the Biden administration, using some clever legal mumbo jumbo to get around federal impoundment law, withheld appropriated funds for border wall construction.

No, the real failure, in my mind, should be tracked back to Congress’s doorstep, where trails of failure are piling up. Congress had the opportunity to eliminate or fundamentally reform AmeriCorps but did not. Period.

And so the spigot is open. Wisconsin apparently is receiving $9.2 million in federal AmeriCorps funding to support volunteer programs and community service efforts across the state. Serve Wisconsin, the state commission that administers AmeriCorps programs, said the funding will support 17 programs, the Wisconsin National and Community Service Board, and volunteer initiatives through the AmeriCorps Volunteer Generation Fund.

Some 716 AmeriCorps members will serve at about 200 sites, working in education, health care and substance-abuse recovery, housing, conservation, disability services, and homelessness programs. Those are precisely the kinds of worthy-sounding activities that have always provided AmeriCorps with its political armor.

And armor is what it is because inside this Trojan horse has always been a left-wing army of gullible young people willing to march on behalf of the workers of the world—a population that they are in no danger of joining.

So the money is running out of our pockets to these privileged ne’er-do-wells. Given that social justice community organizing on the taxpayer dime is back in business, it’s time to take a look again at the program, which, when we last reported, had failed financial audit after financial audit, along with being exposed as a far-left propaganda machine.

Yeah, about those failed audits

When last we visited AmeriCorps, it had failed its eighth consecutive financial audit, so there’s nothing like an update to reassure us, right? The only thing is, now they have failed their ninth straight audit.

“Independent auditors have declined to issue an opinion on AmeriCorps’ financial statements for the ninth year,” the Office of Inspector General (OIG) for the agency reported on January 30.

“They issued a disclaimer of opinion reporting 11 material weaknesses and two significant deficiencies and added three new recommendations. The auditors, however, verified that AmeriCorps took appropriate actions to close five of the 77 prior year recommendations. As a result of this audit, there are now 75 open recommendations.”

How’s that for five steps forward and three steps back?

As for the National Service Trust, which holds funds to pay members who complete their service terms and which represents AmeriCorps’ largest financial liability at $278 million, “AmeriCorps has been unable to produce auditable financial statements for the last nine years,” OIG stated. A 2026 audit of AmeriCorps’ grant closeout process found that the agency lacked adequate procedures for handling grant funds returned after closeout, insufficient internal controls to ensure timely closeouts, and reported inconsistent and inaccurate grant information to USAspending.gov.

“AmeriCorps relies on manual data entry methods to report grant award information to USAspending.gov, without sufficient system controls or independent reviews to detect and correct errors prior to submission,” the OIG reported on February 10. “Furthermore, AmeriCorps failed to effectively utilize administrative closeouts when grant recipients did not provide final reports within one year of the award’s period of performance end date.”

Another 2025 fiscal year audit concluded that AmeriCorps’ information security program remains ineffective, the OIG reported, with “control weaknesses” in cybersecurity governance, risk and asset management, configuration management, information security, continuous monitoring, and contingency planning.

That latter failure no doubt meant they did not even know how to get out of Dodge when DOGE rolled in.

And what about its compliance with the Payment Integrity Information Act (PIIA) that requires agencies to annually review and identify programs and activities that may be susceptible to significant improper payments? Well, AmeriCorps met only seven of 10 compliance requirements in 2025, according to the OIG.

The point is cumulative, and taxpayers are again sending millions of dollars to an organization whose fundamental financial control problems remain unresolved almost a decade after they were discovered.

Now, I always want to be fair. Those who read me regularly at MacIver know I have a soft spot for many on the left. Sure, some progressives are malevolent, but others are just well-meaning dunces whose minds, to paraphrase the late John O’Donohue, are unburdened by thought. These are the left’s well-meaners, as opposed to the right’s bitter-clingers.

In this case, AmeriCorps’ well-meaners have been trying to fix its financial mess, and Trump and Elon Musk may have in part short-circuited that effort.

More about that in a second, but obviously, after failing audits in multiple consecutive years, AmeriCorps knew it had a problem. An earlier attempt to develop a modern grants-and-member management system ended in 2019 after the agency spent $33.8 million without producing anything viable, according to its inspector general. The agency tried again in 2022, awarding Ernst & Young (EY) an approximately $9 million contract to modernize its eGrants system. By September 2024, however, the inspector general warned that anticipated cost overruns on that project exceeded $9 million, more than the price of the original contract itself.

But there was some progress. AmeriCorps closed 20 outstanding audit recommendations in 2024, up from seven the year before, while material weaknesses fell from 12 to 11. That doesn’t turn a hot fiscal mess into a cool model of fiscal stewardship, but it does mean the reform effort wasn’t entirely imaginary.

On the contrary, our social justice angels were trying real hard to earn and keep their wings, as social justice angels are wont to do. They also are wont to cry a lot, but that’s another story.

On the other side of the equation—no more Mr. Nice Guy now—AmeriCorps promised to fix longstanding financial-reporting weaknesses but did not follow through, for whatever reason. Rather than correcting the systems and processes producing unreliable financial information, AmeriCorps continued relying heavily on manual accounting adjustments to make the numbers come out right after the fact.

So they failed but spent a lot of money failing. Or to say it another way, long before DOGE arrived, AmeriCorps had developed an impressive ability to spend taxpayer money attempting to improve its ability to spend taxpayer money. As such, the Trump administration inherited a genuine mess. DOGE didn’t create AmeriCorps’ financial incompetence.

On the other hand, DOGE may have helped stop the effort to repair it. Musk and his minions arrived in April 2025 amid the administration’s effort to shrink AmeriCorps. Within weeks, the agency terminated its EY financial-reform agreement, placed nearly 600 employees, or 85 percent, on administrative leave, canceled 102 contracts pursuant to DOGE guidance, issued reduction-in-force notices to 322 employees, and terminated 1,031 grants with total federal awards of around $396.5 million.

Now I want to be clear here. There’s no evidence, at least that I have, that DOGE specifically ordered cancellation of the EY financial-reform contract. But the contract was terminated during the DOGE-directed restructuring, just three days before AmeriCorps canceled 102 other contracts pursuant to DOGE guidance.

AmeriCorps’ own 2025 report says this: “In FY 2025, as a result of administrative actions and executive orders, AmeriCorps terminated contracts related to financial and operational reform. Therefore, progress on improving financial reporting and the internal control program has stalled, and plans are unknown.”

Presumably there are still unknowns as another pallet of money rolls out the AmeriCorps’ door, or goes down the toilet. By the looks of its books, it doesn’t know which.

Look! The mission, the mission …

To be sure, the AmeriCorps receiving funding today isn’t quite the AmeriCorps of the Biden administration, or the one I described in my report just last year. For nostalgia’s sake—and because the past can be prologue—let’s look at some of the mission statements I reported then, all of which made clear that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) was not an optional add-on but a core organizing principle and that progressive policy priorities were foremost on the AmeriCorps 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, 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.”

The 2023 report said AmeriCorps volunteers and workers were on the frontlines of major social upheavals.

In other words, as I observed last year, they were arming the revolution against you and me and the constitution, funded by our own money. The key to a DEI progressive future was in its grassroots community work, the report stated:

Of course, that’s all water under the bridge now, AmeriCorps wants us to believe. Let’s let bygones be bygones. That’s the language coming from the same people who said the same things after they beat and battered our civil liberties during Covid, threatening our livelihoods and liberty.

The 2025 management report sounds dramatically different: “Our focus in FY 2025 has been reshaping our workforce, streamlining our business processes, and centering our work on core business—AmeriCorps programs,” writes interim agency head Jennifer Bastress Tahmasebi. “Communities across the nation continue to meet critical needs through the power of citizen service, and AmeriCorps is proud to be a conduit for Americans to take action through national service. Our agency remains committed to effectively stewarding federal resources to support our grantees and sponsors as they provide these opportunities.”

Whether DOGE impeded fiscal progress is debatable, but give Trump credit where credit is due. The explicitly ideological framework of the Biden years has vanished from the agency’s governing rhetoric. Still, putting lipstick on a pig doesn’t necessarily change where the pig will go to wallow, and dressing up the mission statement doesn’t necessarily change where the money lands. Changing Washington’s mission statement doesn’t instantly change the enormous downstream leftist network through which federal money flows.

Anything but. For example, AmeriCorps’ website still lists an Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility, and current AmeriCorps-funded program listings can still include DEI-related training requirements.

Looking at Wisconsin programs that will be funded, Marquette’s taxpayer-supported 414 Fellows AmeriCorps program still tells its 2026–27 AmeriCorps recruits that they will “[b]ecome a part of a movement to promote social justice and equity: Learn about and take steps to address issues in Milwaukee including educational inequality, poverty, and segregation,” it exhorts.

Serve Wisconsin still describes TFA’s (Teach for America) AmeriCorps mission this way: “AmeriCorps Volunteers lead classrooms across the City of Milwaukee while growing and strengthening the movement for educational equity and excellence.”

None of this is to say that all 17 AmeriCorps programs in Wisconsin are left-wing. But it is to acknowledge that some organizations receiving downstream support remain committed to an extreme ideological agenda that has so far survived the Trump administration. They are radicals burrowing in for the long haul, and they are the reason AmeriCorps needs to be shut down once and for all.

That doesn’t mean the baby must be thrown out with the bathwater, but a clean slate, competent leadership, full accountability, and case-by-case program funding—with congressional and state vetting—need to be top priorities. And every program that survives should stand on its own, rather than being bundled under an umbrella organization.

The Trump administration appears to have accomplished something significant at AmeriCorps: the Biden-era language making racial and economic equity central to the agency’s priorities has largely disappeared. Unfortunately, the administration’s disruption coincided with the collapse of the financial-reform effort intended to make AmeriCorps accountable for taxpayer dollars.

And because Congress didn’t eliminate AmeriCorps, taxpayers now face the worst of all worlds. The program has survived; the money is flowing; many, if not most, of the outward-bound recipients are still hard left; and the agency still cannot produce auditable books.

In the end, maybe the courts were legally right to stop Trump’s unilateral attempted evisceration of the agency.

But that doesn’t vindicate AmeriCorps, and it certainly does not say much for Congress, which is now responsible for continuing to finance an agency that has failed to produce auditable financial statements for nine consecutive years. None of this would matter nearly so much if Congress had actually done its job and decided whether this troubled agency deserved to survive.

The answer, we all know, would have been a no-brainer.