Trump’s DOGE AmeriCorps cuts trickle down to Minnesota, with thousands affected

When news of more budget cuts championed by billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) trickled down to thousands of AmeriCorps members and volunteers across Minnesota last week, a sense of outrage, frustration and anger followed.

“It‘s devastating,” said Jodi Slick, chief executive of Ecolibrium3, a Duluth-based community organization that supports two AmeriCorps programs combating poverty in the Northland. “This is a loss of key community support that will ripple throughout the region.”

An independent federal agency that champions community-based service and volunteerism, AmeriCorps placed at least 85% of its workforce on administrative leave last month with the warning that their jobs would be eliminated by June 24. And the latest blow landed on Friday when about $400 million in grant funding nationwide was terminated effective immediately.

The DOGE mandate affects some 14,000 volunteers and members in Minnesota serving 2,100 locations, including schools, food banks, homeless shelters, health clinics, youth centers, veterans’ facilities, and other nonprofit and faith-based organizations, according to its annual report.

Within days of the DOGE edict, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison joined in a multistate lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s dismantling of AmeriCorps and its grant programs here and across the country.

“AmeriCorps is a program dedicated to public service and meeting the needs of individual communities across our state and country,” Ellison said in a news release.

AmeriCorps members in Minnesota “tutor students in reading and math, help build affordable housing, teach digital literacy to Minnesotans to improve their economic opportunities, and so much more,” he added.

Historically, Minnesota has enjoyed a high level of participation in the program, which traces its roots back to President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA), for example, has been working with AmeriCorps for decades to help reduce runoff, improve water quality in rivers and lakes and run a slew of other environmental projects throughout the state.

The program, called GreenCorps, currently has 52 workers set up in dozens of counties, municipalities and tribal governments working on 11-month terms that end in August.

The state will be able to keep the program staffed and running at least through the end of June — the end of the state’s fiscal year – and hopefully for the rest of the term, said Katrina Kessler, the commissioner of the Pollution Control Agency.

“And then going forward, we’re as surprised as everybody else and we don’t know what the next iteration of GreenCorps is going to be,” Kessler said.

Bemidji State University used it to drastically cut the amount of furniture and clothes that ends up in landfills after each semester. Hennepin County is using it help plant trees in areas that have been laid bare by the ash borer, need shade and have high amounts of car traffic and exhaust pollution.

It offers good experience for young people, who are typically right out of college, and has been great deal for towns, counties and taxpayers, who get 11 months of full-time work for a $28,000 stipend, Kessler said.