WEST COLUMBIA, Texas – Years had passed since Hurricane Harvey’s howling winds and heavy rains tore apart Dan Lee’s century-old roof in West Columbia, south of Houston. Then came the knock on his door.
It was Mosaic in Action, a nonprofit that has helped more than 450 homeowners and relies on an AmeriCorps community service program that sends young adults to work on projects across the U.S. The organization repaired Lee's roof and got rid of the mold left behind in Harvey's wake.
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“Before they came, man, I had holes in the ceiling where it got wet and the sheetrock had failed,” Lee said at his home. “I was ashamed of it. They’ve just been a blessing.”
Last month, President Donald Trump ’s cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, gutted AmeriCorps, a 30-year-old federal agency that dispatches 200,000 volunteers and hundreds of millions of dollars. For Mosaic in Action, that meant a 10-person team it was counting on would not arrive a few days later as planned, entailing a loss of nearly 2,000 hours of service that had been committed to help 11 homeowners.
“You can imagine what it’s like to be in your home, never knowing how much rain’s gonna come in that day,” said Debbie Allensworth, executive director and co-founder of Mosaic in Action. “Without those valuable workers, we just can’t do the work.”
The far-reaching government cuts have left communities across the country — small and large, urban and rural, in red and blue states alike — scrambling for alternatives amid the uncertainty, trying to sustain a slew of initiatives, from after-school programs to veterans’ services to natural disaster response.
Long a target of critics
AmeriCorps employs more than 500 full-time federal workers, most of whom are now on administrative leave, and has an operating budget of roughly $1 billion. Despite bipartisan support, it has long been a target of critics who decry bloat, inefficiencies and misuse of funds.
“President Trump has the legal right to restore accountability to the entire Executive Branch,” Anna Kelly, White House deputy press secretary, said this week via email after Democratic officials in about two dozen states filed a federal lawsuit.
In the weeks since corps members were let go and grants were abruptly canceled, organizations and volunteers have been searching for alternative solutions.
In West Virginia, High Rocks Education Corporation was told last week to immediately halt its programming funded by the AmeriCorps State and National grant program, including growing food, teaching digital literacy and mentoring kids in afterschool programs.
High Rocks executive director Sarah Riley said the organization has been trying to find emergency money to support corps members who will no longer have a paycheck and the nearly two dozen partner organizations that relied on AmeriCorps.
“We’re all desperately trying to figure that out,” Riley said. “Organizations will 100% fold over this.”
Meanwhile there is a broader ripple effect that leaves holes in communities, Riley added.
“All of the kids that they mentor, that was a really important adult in their life who cared about them, who’s now gone with no ability to say goodbye,” she said. “I don’t know how you measure that.”
Not ready for service to end
Anna Gibbons, a 23-year-old team leader with AmeriCorps’ National Civilian Community Corps, started reaching out to sponsor organizations days after being discharged three months early. She and her peers also started an online fundraiser, which brought in over $11,000 in donations within a little over a week.
Now they are headed to work at an environmental and education center in rural Oregon — without the support of the federal agency.
“We weren’t ready for our service to end,” Gibbons said. “We had the manpower to do it, we just needed the funds.”
In central Wyoming, the Casper Housing Authority was counting on an AmeriCorps team to kick-start food production on an urban farm providing fresh, locally grown produce to residents.
Within 48 hours of learning that AmeriCorps was dismissing the 10 workers, the authority received a $20,000 donation from the Zimmerman Family Foundation allowing it to bring in the corps members and pay them minimum wage.
Such workarounds are bandages that will be difficult to maintain, said Judd Jeansonne, executive director of the Volunteer Louisiana service commission. Public funding through AmeriCorps has always been coupled with private dollars, he said, but it is a symbiotic relationship with one requiring the presence of the other to subsist.
“It’s not sustainable in the long term,” Jeansonne said, “because those investments historically have been part of the puzzle, not the whole puzzle.”
And while AmeriCorps is a large national investment, Jeansonne said, it's unique in that most funding decisions are made locally by state service commissions like the one he runs in Louisiana.
“It’s meeting critical community needs,” he said. “These are people in Louisiana or Mississippi or Arkansas, or wherever they are, identifying the needs and making sure that the dollars go there.”
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Fingerhut reported from Des Moines, Iowa.