Americorps cuts hit Ohio classrooms

My partner is a 10th-grade geometry teacher at Mifflin High School, a Columbus City Schools secondary school on the northeast side. For the past three years, she has had an assistant from the City Year program.

This is an AmeriCorps program that places qualified full-time volunteers in schools to support teachers and the development of children.

Her City Year volunteer was a kind person who supported children and helped with her workload of teaching math to high school-age children. It wasn’t rare for her to come home telling me she didn’t know what she would do without her City Year volunteer.

She will have to figure that out soon. Earlier this week, she arrived at school to find her City Year volunteer was gone. By the end of the day, an announcement was made to the school: Columbus City School’s 30-year relationship with the City Year program was over. This was a direct result of the federal Department of Government Efficiency’s decision last week to cut 41% of the AmeriCorps program budget.

AmeriCorps was the beginning of my career. I enrolled as a full-time volunteer a few months after graduating from Denison University and was selected to serve as a community organizer supporting neighborhood associations for the mayor of Omaha, Nebraska. At the same time, my mother, back in the workforce with her three children out of high school, enrolled in AmeriCorps to evaluate literacy instruction programs for young children.

In 2020, my firm Scioto Analysis conducted a cost-benefit analysis of AmeriCorps programs in Ohio. We found that the programs have significant impacts on the trajectory of participants. People who enroll in the program have much higher future earnings and lower chances of criminal justice involvement. The best evidence available tells us cutting AmeriCorps will result in lower wages and higher crime rates for Ohio. We found that the net benefits of the program in Ohio range somewhere from from $1 million to $30 million and that expansions of the program could push net benefits into the nine-figure range.

It seems that the decisions being made at the federal level are blind to one side of the accounting ledger. In the fervor to reduce spending and cut administrative offices at the federal level, DOGE leader Elon Musk and other decision makers are failing to consider the benefits of programs they eliminate. I have no doubt in my mind that there are reasonable cuts that can be made to federal programs. The problem is that the current approach is not reasonable: it is the public finance equivalent of conducting open-heart surgery with a chainsaw.

The sad thing about this from the perspective of the fiscal hawk is that these cuts will have very little effect on the federal debt. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, even a spending cut 1,000 times the size of the AmeriCorps cut last week would only reduce the federal-debt-to-GDP ratio by one percentage point in the next decade. Cutting AmeriCorps is a drop in the bucket in the context of U.S. debt.

The benefits of cutting Americorps funds are hard to divine. Its costs are clear. In the meantime, volunteers will be lost and children from low-income families in a high-poverty school district will have one less resource available to them in their already under-resourced classrooms.