Bush slashing AmeriCorps by 80%

from the Washington Post:

One of the three programs within AmeriCorps, the National Civilian Community Corps, will have its budget cut from $27 million to $5 million. This comes at a time when the functions provided by this specific arm are needed most:

AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps, which brings more than 1,100 18- to 24-year-olds together on five residential campuses to spend 10 months working on service projects, with an emphasis on homeland security and disaster relief.

These days, about half of all participants are in Mississippi and Louisiana at any given time, pitching in with Hurricane Katrina rebuilding efforts for eight-to-nine-week stints, Eisner said.

We encountered a group of AmeriCorps kids while we were eating lunch at the FEMA tent while working on the child care tents in Pass Christian, MS. The Bush administration calls the program “ineffective.”

President Bush, who embraced AmeriCorps as part of his “compassionate conservative” agenda in 2001, now wants to shut down a part of the national service program that his administration has deemed “ineffective.”

The fact that he’s not a conservative is apparent from the massive expansion of the federal government during his presidency. The fact that he’s not compassionate in any sense of the word is demonstrated by most of his other actions, including this one.

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