Since President Donald Trump returned to the White Home in January 2025, his administration has slashed the work of many U.S. government agencies, together with these targeted on overseas coverage. Now, there’s concern that the Peace Corps could join the other foreign aid packages the administration is attempting to dismantle.
America Company for Worldwide Growth largely shut down in February and March 2025, with its workforce reduced from greater than 10,000 to 15 people on staff.
In early April 2025, members of Elon Musk’s Division of Authorities Effectivity showed up at Peace Corps headquarters in Washington, D.C., signaling doable cuts.
DOGE has additionally known as for reducing the number of the Peace Corps’ 970 full-time staff who assist recruit and oversee the work of volunteers.
The Guardian reported on April 28 that the Peace Corps is offering staff a buyout, and that Peace Corps management expects “important restructuring efforts.”
The Peace Corps instructed The New York Instances in an April 28 assertion that “the company will stay operational and proceed to recruit, place, and practice volunteers, whereas persevering with to help their well being, security and safety, and efficient service.”
As a scholar of international affairs, I believe you will need to perceive the refined – however essential – position that the Peace Corps performs in serving to the U.S. keep a constructive worldwide picture.
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Understanding the Peace Corps
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy created the Peace Corps, an impartial company within the federal authorities, alongside USAID as a method to reinvigorate American diplomacy.
Kennedy seen the State Division as a company that lacked innovation, staffed by self-serving folks with out a lot sensible expertise.
For the reason that Sixties, the Peace Corps has despatched more than 240,000 U.S. citizens – lots of them younger folks – to work as volunteers in additional than 60 low- and middle-income nations on short-term initiatives, starting from educating college students English to serving to farmers improve their meals manufacturing. This works out to about 3,500 to 4,000 volunteers abroad each year.
As Kennedy hoped, many of those American volunteers returned residence to ultimately serve within the State Division, with some rising to the highest ranks, corresponding to Christopher Hill, a profession diplomat who served within the Peace Corps in Cameroon within the Nineteen Seventies.
Peace Corps volunteers, typically generally known as PCVs, additionally go on to work in different sorts of public service, together with in instructional roles. It has additionally been frequent for former Peace Corps volunteers to work for USAID.
Peace Corps’ position in US authorities
The Peace Corps just isn’t a part of the day-to-day actions of U.S. overseas coverage in the identical means because the State Division, for instance, which has diplomatic missions the world over.
The Peace Corps, with a US$495 million annual budget, does contribute to U.S. overseas coverage objectives by enhancing U.S. mushy energy. Soft power, on this context, means getting others to need what you need.
The political scientist Joseph Nye launched the tutorial idea of sentimental energy to the mainstream within the early 1990s. It’s typically misunderstood. Some mistakenly check with the army as exhausting energy, and financial and diplomatic instruments as mushy energy.
However mushy energy – and the attract of a undertaking just like the Peace Corps – is based within the energy of attraction. The Peace Corps, merely put, helps enhance the U.S.’s picture worldwide.
My analysis on Latin American nations has proven that the presence of a Peace Corps program improves the popular perception of the U.S. amongst communities there. A great fame fosters goodwill and helps the U.S. obtain its concrete overseas coverage objectives, be it making a commerce deal or serving to to finish a battle.
The political scientist Stephen Magu has discovered related outcomes throughout Africa, together with a connection between the variety of Peace Corps volunteers in a rustic and help for the U.S. in its work on the United Nations.
The Peace Corps’ expertise
The Peace Corps makes use of a really selective application process to recruit People of all ages to volunteer for 2 years in another country, doing totally different sorts of service work starting from agriculture and schooling to well being and the setting.
Most are youthful folks with faculty levels, however there’s no upper age limit to qualify and no requirement of a college degree to serve.
There is no such thing as a single Peace Corps expertise.
However all volunteers stay and work in a neighborhood that has requested a volunteer to assist with various kinds of actions. This might embrace serving to native ladies arrange their very own small businesses in Panama or providing well being workshops on decreasing the danger of contracting and spreading HIV in Eswatini, previously knwon as Swaziland. These volunteers are normally *the one People for miles round.
Volunteers are anticipated to stay modestly and are paid a month-to-month living allowance that covers their naked requirements.
Volunteers’ work just isn’t simple and never with out danger. Since 1961, 311 people have died whereas serving. Many of the deaths are attributable to accidents, normally associated to transportation. Some have died from illnesses and sickness, and some have been victims of murder.
Peace Corps’ strategy to volunteer work
The Peace Corps emphasizes what is called grassroots development in overseas help circles. Which means a Peace Corps volunteer tries to make use of native cash and experience to attain objectives collectively recognized by the neighborhood and the volunteer.
Critics of the Peace Corps have argued, amongst different issues, that it has not made widespread modifications that reliably final past the two-year time period of every volunteer.
However the Peace Corps just isn’t supposed to alter the trajectory of a rustic’s financial growth and all of a sudden make a poor nation a wealthy one. Volunteers do assist the folks in the neighborhood they serve in small however significant methods.
In my very own service as a Peace Corps volunteer within the Dominican Republic from 1989 to 1991, for instance, I had an indication vegetable backyard the place I grew nutritious greens corresponding to spinach and mustard greens. Dominicans didn’t historically eat these greens, however I obtained my neighbors and pals to strive them. Some realized to actually like them and started to develop them on their very own.
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One other type of public diplomacy
When requested in 1962 how he noticed the connection of the Peace Corps to U.S. overseas coverage, Kennedy responded that he noticed the Peace Corps as “a chance to emphasise a special a part of our American character,” as a substitute of the concept the U.S. is a “harsh, narrow-minded militaristic, materialistic society.”
The Trump administration tends to view overseas help packages as open-ended charity packages that should be eradicated.
I consider that overseas help packages usually are not charity – they’re public diplomacy instruments that contribute to the U.S.’s international energy. If the Peace Corps is eradicated, the U.S. will lose one other essential instrument of overseas coverage.
