[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 9 (Tuesday, January 17, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Page S975]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               AMERICORPS

  Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, we have recently heard in the news quite 
a bit about AmeriCorps, and that is President Clinton's new program on 
voluntarism.
  As many of my colleagues know, I spent several months investigating 
this whole matter, and I continue to review and will continue to review 
for a long time into the future the merits of AmeriCorps. There has 
been bipartisan criticism of this program and this concept of so-called 
voluntarism.
  This administration seems to have learned nothing from its recent 
efforts to force a top-down solution to programs, for instance, like 
health care. The American people rejected at the ballot box last 
November a bureaucratic solution that the administration had for health 
care reform.
  Now the administration believes the answer to voluntarism is to have 
it driven from the top down. They want to bureaucratize voluntarism. In 
health care reform, they wanted to make the choice for each citizen's 
health care. In this program, they want to make the moral choice for 
each volunteer, and they want to pay him for that.
  That subverts the concept of voluntarism, in my view. It turns the 
notion of voluntarism on its head. Nevertheless, the administration 
wants to go forward despite the fact that 1.9 million Americans are 
already volunteering on their own and doing it without pay and they are 
doing it all over the United States because they are doing it by making 
their own moral choices within their own communities as they see the 
needs of those communities.
  Mr. President, it is discouraging that the President has completely 
disregarded the findings of Vice President Gore's National Performance 
Review when it comes to the question of AmeriCorps or the expansion of 
the program. A founding principle of reinventing Government is that, 
according to Vice President Gore, you should not increase funding a 
program until it is a proven success. This administration has sought 
dramatic increases for AmeriCorps with little to no support the 
proposition whether or not it is succeeding.
  The problem with AmeriCorps is the same problem that I see in the 
boondoggles of the Defense Department. As you remember, a decade ago, 
$500 hammers got a lot of attention, the $500 hammers that the Defense 
Department was buying.
  In AmeriCorps, we recently uncovered that President Clinton's 
AmeriCorps is paying over $70,000 for one--yes, Mr. President, that is 
one--volunteer for AmeriCorps. That $70,000 could instead be used to 
provide dozens of young people Pell grants so that they could attend 
college. This point was made on this very floor 2 years ago by the then 
chairman of the Appropriations Committee, the distinguished Senator 
from West Virginia, and that was when we were considering authorizing 
AmeriCorps at that particular time.
  Instead, we are spending this money on creating one job with the 
Philadelphia Bar Association. That $70,000 job in Philadelphia is, 
unfortunately, not an anomaly. AmeriCorps has already provided me with 
many, many grants where the costs will be over $40,000 per year per 
job.
  I am very pleased to announce to my colleagues today that the General 
Accounting Office has agreed to my request made in behalf of myself and 
Senator Mikulski to initiate an investigation into the actual costs of 
AmeriCorps. I am confident that the GAO investigation into AmeriCorps 
will help us all be better informed about the tremendous costs of this 
program.
  As I read reports on the President's remarks, he intends to draw a 
line in the sand on this program. He intends to use this program to 
delineate the two political parties. I welcome this challenge because I 
believe the American people just repudiated the approach exemplified by 
the AmeriCorps Program. Just as they did not want to have a top-down 
bureaucratic solution on health care reform, they cannot fathom the 
same approach to voluntarism.
  The American people do not want Government to make their moral 
choices for them. They do not want Government telling them for whom 
they should and should not volunteer, and they certainly can see 
through the rather thinly veiled attempt to subvert voluntarism by 
paying for it rather than using moral suasion.
  Mr. President, I have received much data already from AmeriCorps 
pertaining to their grants. That data only further fuels my skepticism. 
I have also asked the General Accounting Office to independently 
analyze and evaluate the program. I will await their report this spring 
until I render a final judgment about the program.
  But I must say, the celestial bodies seem to be aligned against the 
program, and the American people are against the approach embodied 
here. The administration would do better to more accurately apply the 
principles of reinventing Government to this concept. Rather than 
bureaucratizing and rather than drawing a line in the sand, we can be 
working together to make voluntarism work the way it has--and quite 
effectively and quite amazingly--since the earliest days of the 
Republic.
  I yield the floor and yield back the remainder of my time.

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