A Peace Corps Constitution by Ben East (Malawi)

By Ben East (Malawi 1996-98)

John Coyne’s reflection ‘Saying “Goodbye” to the Peace Corps’ generated a buzz here that proves the vitality of both our community and the agency that brings us together. Data supports this outlook: the organization’s most recent congressional budget justifications reveal an upward trajectory in volunteer levels and funding for all years since the end of the pandemic.

The fiscal year 2022 budget, for example, supported 700 trainees and volunteers. That figure more than tripled for FY23 with 2,290; grew in 2024 to 3,620; and is poised to increase again with plans for 4,590 volunteers and trainees in FY25.

The record on funding for this growth is harder to interpret, but it appears that the levels from FY21-23 increased as follows: $367 million, $410 million, and $463 million. The agency appears to be funded at least to $467 million for FY24, with plans to request $504 million for 2025.

In short time, the agency has gone from removing all volunteers from the field in response to COVID-19 to returning its footprint to pre-pandemic levels in some 65 countries.

Concerns about a possible second Trump Administration dooming the agency are understandable, but can be put to rest by studying its survival of the first. In fact, the former president’s petty attempts to extract a few thin dimes from the Peace Corps hide met with abject failure. He proposed $10 million reductions during each of his four years in office and congress said no every time. Even when Republicans controlled both chambers the first two years, congress restored the budget to its full $410 million – a flatline the agency endured from 2016-2022.

It’s true, none of this brings volunteer levels to the roughly 6,000 serving annually from 2013-2019, or the 6-7,000 each year during the decade before that. But they aren’t far from where the agency found itself during the Reagan years, all below 5,000 except 1986. Here was a Republican president who saw the value of a Peace Corps, not only restoring the agency’s independence after Nixon ordered it folded into ACTION in 1971. He gave the Peace Corps its longest-serving Director in Loret Miller Ruppe, perhaps second in influence at the White House only to Sargent Shriver.

Another thought on volunteer numbers. The high-water mark of 15,000 volunteers achieved in 1966 proved unsustainable and was quickly abandoned for the 6,000 range throughout the Seventies. Another Republican, George W. Bush, did float plans in 2001 to double the number of volunteers to 14,000. So eager was he to win hearts and minds with this cost-effective instrument that he sent Director Gaddi Vasquez on a scouting mission to Kabul in early 2002, just as the U.S. invasion had morphed into a protracted war against the Taliban. Each of the Afghan officials he met—including future presidents Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani, and interim Vice Chair and Minister for Women’s Affairs Sima Samar—fondly recounted for him their days learning basketball, dance, and English from Peace Corps Volunteers.

Despite their effusive accounting of the program’s contribution to their lives and the country’s development, Vasquez ultimately reported back to the White House that conditions weren’t ripe for volunteers, what with a war going on, and Bush’s “doubling” never crested 7,875. Crossing the 8,000 mark wouldn’t happen until after the election of Barack Obama restored optimism in America’s role in the world: 2010 and 2011 fielded 8,256 and 8,460 volunteers, respectively.

John raises legitimate concerns about declining volunteer applications compared to previous decades. The reality is that interest in service careers and volunteerism of all kinds are in the basement. The number of Foreign Service Officer applications, for example, have spiraled from 20,000 each year between 2010 and 2013 (they had spiked from 8,000 at the end of George Bush’s term in 2008 to 16,000 during the first year of Obama’s presidency) down to around 5,000 each year since 2020. It’s possible, too, that the lag in recruitment is driven less by politics than by the persistence of a job market favorable to employees.

Much more can be said about Peace Corps’ capacity for survival. From the very start it endured ridicule, scandal, and moments of ignominy that need not be recounted here. Suffice it to say that the agency can, should, and very probably will endure long into the future regardless of what Administration is elected to office in November. It’s very size, the very smallness of it, lends itself to ingenuity and the very resilience the program instills in the volunteers who serve.

Three recent examples showcase this reinvention. Peace Corps Response took the unprecedented measure of putting volunteers into domestic roles with FEMA during the pandemic. A virtual service volunteer program offers an alternative to the two-year service most RPCVs now reflect on as a standard tour. And now it appears the agency is testing a one-year service option in hopes of attracting a cohort of individuals unwilling to commit to more time. The existence of these programs point to an institution capable of shifting to meet the moment, while staying true to its core mission.

That mission, spelled out in three clear goals, hasn’t changed in Peace Corps’ 63-year history. In their own way, these goals represent a sort of Peace Corps “Constitution” and lend the enterprise a sense of perpetual viability.

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Ben East (Malawi 1996-98)

Ben East (Malawi 1996-98) is a Foreign Service Officer currently assigned to Washington, DC. He’s published two novels, Two Pumps for the Body Man (2016) and Patchworks (2017) and recently completed research for a non-fiction account of first generation PCVs who later served as U.S. ambassadors.