Explainer: AmeriCorps NCCC

Many associate AmeriCorps with former president Bill Clinton. (Sang Tan - AP)

Whose program is it, anyway?

The AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps program that President Bush wants to eliminate generally is associated with President Bill Clinton, who made AmeriCorps a brand name for national service in the 1990s.

But that association is wrong, AmeriCorps chief David Eisner wrote The Washington Post last week. The NCCC got its start in a 1992 defense bill. So the program that Bush wants to kill by cutting its budget from $27 million to $5 million is not a product of the Clinton administration but of his father's. "[T]he NCCC program wasn't created by President Clinton -- it was signed into law as a demonstration program by President George H.W. Bush in October 1992," Eisner wrote. "We're proposing to end the NCCC demonstration partly because other AmeriCorps programs have proven they can yield similar results at a lower federal cost."

The program brings together more than 1,100 18-to-24-year-olds on five residential campuses each year to spend 10 months working on service projects, mainly homeland security and disaster relief. The White House has branded it "ineffective" and "extremely expensive" at a cost of $27,859 per participant. Advocates and former participants say the money is worth it, and have rallied support in Congress.

As demonstration programs go, the NCCC has had a long run. It enrolled its first members in the fall of 1994, the second year of Clinton's presidency. More than 11,100 have completed service since then. Hundreds went to the Gulf Coast to help with rebuilding efforts after Hurricane Katrina. The program's roots date to the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Depression-era relief program.

The NCCC is part of a network of programs that share the AmeriCorps moniker and are devoted to youth service in areas such as education, health and the environment.

The other programs are AmeriCorps State and National, which provides grants to nonprofit groups that take on AmeriCorps volunteers, and AmeriCorps Vista, which annually provides about 6,000 full-time participants to community organizations that help impoverished communities. AmeriCorps State and National began under Clinton, while AmeriCorps Vista was a continuation of the Volunteers in Service to America program from the 1960s.

Eisner said that Bush is not putting AmeriCorps into the budget grinder. In his letter, Eisner maintained that Bush "is expanding AmeriCorps in his 2007 budget request to 75,000 AmeriCorps members -- 50 percent more than the previous administration's high-water mark -- even accounting for the elimination of NCCC."

If that number rings a bell, it might be because Bush first pledged to increase AmeriCorps to 75,000 members in January 2002. The program reached that level in 2004, but fell to 74,000 members last year and 73,000 in 2006. Now AmeriCorps officials hope to reach 75,000 again.

-- Christopher Lee