Three bits of information I have learned in the past weeks are making me realize that the Great Purge of 2025 might be coming for the Peace Corps, an entity that has helped to define us for more than 60 years as an essentially generous, self-giving nation.
First, a friend announced on Facebook that she had just lost her job at the University of Minnesota, as it was funded through the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and AHRQ is getting the chop. That news made what had been the vague notion of “slashing the federal budget” into something concrete and personal—and, therefore, something I could keenly feel.
I recalled then that USAID had been chainsawed by DOGE long before the arcane federal bureau called AHRQ, sending a clear signal that “Cruelty will be our point.” The very first symbolic victims of the purge might have been, say, the corporations who weasel their way out of their fair share of taxes to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars every year. But, instead, they chose the image of sick children in poor countries who will die without our life-saving medications. Only people who have never lived among sick children in poor countries could have made such a decision.
That realization led into the third bit of info, which was personal and gleaned in a class in which we were encouraged to consider our “identities.” I scribbled “Mother, Sister, Christian, Teacher, Writer” inside a circle and found in the moment no particular feeling attached to them. But then the teacher asked us to consider the identities we used to have, to which we might still be attached, and then, outside the circle, I wrote three words that—who knew?—are attached to all sorts of feeling: “Peace Corps volunteer.”
For two and a half years in the late 1990s, I was employed by the United States government as a teacher and librarian at Fatima High School, which educated about 600 kids a year. Our modest collection of ranch-style classrooms and dorms lay deep in the green and bountiful Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, a nation home to more than 700 distinct languages, a quarter of the Earth’s total. I was part of a cohort of 48 Americans of all ages, and taxpayers paid for our travel, healthcare, training, and a $100-per-month stipend. (Peace Corps Papua New Guinea was, sadly, discontinued in 2000, due to the worsening safety situation in the country.)
I wondered if there were a non-personal argument to be made for keeping what seems by today’s standards an expendable agency, so I asked Claude AI how much it costs.
The Peace Corps annually expends about $430 million to support 8,000 or so volunteers serving in more than 60 countries around the world.
If the entire federal budget were represented as $100:
- Department of Defense would be about $12.50;
- Social Security would be about $21;
- Medicare would be about $12.50; and
- Peace Corps would be less than one cent ($0.007).
“The Peace Corps budget is so small relative to total federal spending,” asserts Claude, “that it’s essentially a rounding error in the overall budget.”
For a stark contrast, consider how much the U.S. fails each year to collect in taxes from our wealthiest citizens. Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of “Evicted” and, more recently, of “Poverty By America,” pointed out in a recent interview with Jon Stewart that if the top one percent of wage earners in the U.S. “were not taxed at a higher rate, but just paid the taxes they owed, we would net $175 billion dollars a year.”
My Papua New Guinea school itself had not been built and was not sustained by international tax dollars. It was a creation of the American Catholic Church, just as my nearest hospital was a creation of the American Church of the Nazarene. The Christian Brothers founded the school, and a group of Nazarene doctors from Kansas established Kudjip Hospital. Old people told me stories from the World War II era, of being liberated—literally, freed from slavery—by American soldiers. I met thousands of New Guineans, and every one of them thought highly of the United States.
There is no proposal on the table now to do away with the Peace Corps. Hopefully none will be put there. But if the process of making America “Great Again” turns us inward and convinces us to stop using our outsized wealth to serve the world’s less wealthy, we will all be lessened, and the country will be weakened. We will be outraging our founding ideals and shaming the memory of our fallen soldiers.
From a selfish perspective, the Peace Corps provided me with my hero’s journey. When I opened my mind toward what a “primitive culture” had to teach me, my own small world expanded, exponentially. I put aside assumptions about, among other things, friendship, faith, sexism, and what the human body and mind are capable of. I had 14-year-old students who walked for days barefoot through the bush to get to school after vacations. I had a student who had memorized the Bible because he had a voracious mind and no television, or other books, in his village.
I don’t know how much my English literature or library skills classes taught them. But I see now that they learned something important about America by staring at my pictures of New York and Boston. They were in awe of the shining skyscrapers, but also in awe of me, this strange person who would have left such a wondrous place. They could not conceive of what they saw in me as unthinkable generosity and personal sacrifice. “Why did you leave such a rich place, to live with poor people like us?” they asked me.
“Because I wanted to learn about your beautiful country,” was my usual response, which was true.
I was proud to represent my country. I am concerned for the volunteers now out in the field, representing a very different country. There is no aspect of the Trump world that I reject more forcefully than the assumption that our greatness is wrapped up in superficial trappings of wealth and beauty. Peace Corps volunteers, who live side-by-side with citizens of “shithole” countries, can point out people there who live out American values better than our current government does. The macho show of strength and force that is now strutting around purporting to represent us is instead the lowest form of us. I spit on the pictures of masked agents forcing down the heads of Venezuelan detainees. I spit on the ICE agents who make a show of intimidation by invading our towns and dragging fathers away from their families. I do not subscribe to the Trumpian view of the world because it is small, petty, and cold, and the world I want to contribute to rebuilding is big-hearted, open-handed, and abundant.
