Denial of service: the battle over AmeriCorps.

• Author: Sanchez, Julian
• Position: Rant

"ENEMIES WILL USE any weapon at their disposal," warned Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), in their ideological "attack on things that we believe in."

The senator was referring not to Ba'athist hard-liners but to the insidious congressional opponents o AmeriCorps. The Clinton-spawned Works Progress Administration for the new millennium was denied $100 million in emergency funding by a narrow House vote just before the August recess.

A spate of articles, including a New York Times op-ed by literary establishment darling Dave Eggers, quickly condemned such stinginess. Listening to these complaints, you might think the AmeriCorps budget had actually been cut. The reality is slightly more complex.

It turns out AmeriCorps' patent corporation had violated federal law by approving 20,000 more volunteers--and scholarships--than Congress had funded, spending $64 million it didn't have. The causes of this snafu included "little or no communication among key Corporation executives, too much flexibility given to grantees regarding enrollments, and unreliable data on the number of AmeriCorps participants," according to the General Accounting office (GAO).

Despite what one Office of Management and Budget spokesman called "Enron-like" accounting, Congress increased AmeriCorps funding by $42 million in 2003. So how can activists at SaveAmericorps.org say that "Congress cut funding from $240 million to $175 million in Federal Fiscal Year 2003"? The misleading $175 million figure includes only the budget line item for grants and ignores appropriations for, among other things, a trust to help pay off that illegal debt.

The fiscal year 2004 appropriation raises AmeriCorps' budget by another 10 percent, but until that money kicks in, officials say it will be unable to fill 20,000 of its 50,000 volunteer slots without an emergency appropriation. Let's put this "drastic," "crippling" reduction in perspective.

Assume, implausibly, that every one of those 20,000 workers is a full-time volunteer who completes the full 1,700 hours of AmeriCorps service, instead of bailing or being fired after resources have already been spent training him, as was the case for a median of 39 percent of volunteers across...