Bush doing his usual TWOFACED Hypocritical slashing......More billions for weapons....slash Americorps and allow the National Park System to collapse in disrepair
THE NATION
AmeriCorps Funding Set to Be Slashed
From Washington Post
WASHINGTON — Local directors of AmeriCorps, the community-service
program President Bush has praised and promised to expand, said Friday
they have been notified of cutbacks in their allocation of volunteers for the
coming year.
Memos sent to the states by the Corporation for National and Community
Service, the parent agency for AmeriCorps, indicate that dozens and perhaps
hundreds of long-established programs, including some singled out for praise
by the president and First Lady Laura Bush, will lose their funding.
Sandy Scott, spokesman
for the corporation, said
the memos that set off
the alarms Thursday are
"guidance" to the states
and final numbers will
not be announced until
Monday.
Alan Khazei, the founder and chief executive of
Boston-based City Year, one of the oldest and
most highly praised community programs, said the
national office has told him "only three of [City
Year's] 10 programs will be funded. It is
devastating. Basically, national service in America
has been wiped out or reduced to a shell this
week."
The corporation's board learned last month there might be only enough money to cover half of the
50,000 volunteer slots for fiscal 2003. Volunteers are eligible for grants to pay for college.
Administration officials said the cutbacks result from complex accounting and management problems,
plus a reduction in congressional funding.
Bush had proposed a 50% increase in the program's size — to 75,000 members. But Bush has not
intervened to block the cutbacks.
Paul Schmitz, who runs Public Allies, an 11-year-old program that recruits and trains young adults to
work for community groups, said its programs in Milwaukee, Chicago and Cincinnati, which now have
88 AmeriCorps workers, "will receive no funding and no volunteers for next year."
"We had 100 applications and interviewed 77 people last week," he said, "and now we may have no
slots for them. People are in tears about what is happening." |
