Defending the Peace Corps When It Needs No Defense

In a nation that no longer knows what to do with humility, service itself has become suspect.

May 04, 2025

The Peace Corps isn’t being dismantled. It’s being drained—of staff, of memory, of meaning.

In late April 2025, Peace Corps staff received a memo offering a “fork in the road”—a voluntary separation package with a tight deadline. No headlines. No hearings. Just quiet exits from buildings that once taught Americans how to serve.

It wasn’t a shutdown. It was a signal. A country unlearning the value of staying.

In 1961, at the height of Cold War tensions and civil unrest, John F. Kennedy didn’t call for bureaucrats. He called for idealists. “This call to service is not for the faint-hearted,” he said. The Peace Corps wasn’t a liberal hobby—it was law. It asked Americans to live poor, work hard, and stay long enough to matter.

And now, that idea—that staying matters—is being unlearned. Deliberately. Methodically. In plain sight.

Sargent Shriver, who built this thing from scratch, once said, “The Peace Corps represents some, if not all, of the best virtues in this society. It stands for everything that America has ever stood for.” What’s being lost is empathy without agenda, service without spectacle, and presence without profit.

The ax came dressed in euphemism. “Efficiency.” “Reorganization.” It arrived under the cold banner of the Department of Government Efficiency—DOGE. But this wasn’t streamlining. This was subtraction. Subtraction of knowledge. Subtraction of continuity. Subtraction of belief.

DOGE had already frozen AmeriCorps. Dismantled USAID. Muzzled the U.S. Institute of Peace. Defunded NPR and PBS. Gagged Voice of America. And now, like the lidless Eye of Sauron, it swivels toward the Peace Corps—not because it was wasteful, but because it still dared to whisper that public service might mean something more than career advancement.

But there was no fat to trim. Peace Corps was already bare. Staff rotated out every five years. No pensions. No lifers. No empire. Just a lean machine built to carry Americans into the hard places of the world with nothing but notebooks and language guides.

This isn’t fiscal policy. It’s a philosophy. A rejection of anything that can’t be bought, measured, or sold.

And so they are not killing the Peace Corps. They are starving it. They are hollowing it until it forgets the song it was born to sing.

Working in Fear. Peace Corps Deserves Better.

By the time DOGE turned its gaze toward the Peace Corps, its playbook was already well known.

They didn’t need to shout. They sent the letter.

Ten days. That’s what staff were given—ten days to consider the Deferred Resignation Program 2.0, or “DRP.” Ten days to clear out desks, sign silence, and disappear. Some called it a buyout. Others called it surrender.

The official word was “streamlining.” But the air said something different. Not tension—dread. Because everyone had seen what came next.

They’d already gutted AmeriCorps. USAID was bleeding talent—over 10,000 of some of the most experienced development and humanitarian professionals in the world, gone. The U.S. Institute of Peace had been left a shell. DOGE didn’t just trim budgets. It rewrote the value of service. It made belief look reckless. It made purpose feel like a liability.

And the Peace Corps was never built to survive that kind of message.

Inside the agency, DRP 2.0 wasn’t just paperwork—it was a purge of memory. The people who trained volunteers, who walked them through malaria protocols, who tracked hurricanes and handled evacuations—gone. Not because they failed. Because they were in the way.

Yes, the Peace Corps has always turned over its people. Five-year term limits by law. But that churn had rhythm. Knowledge passed from one generation to the next. Systems didn’t restart—they matured. DRP 2.0 severed that chain.

And it didn’t stop with people.

DOGE requested internal records—financials, staffing data, systems access. Staff were told to comply. But the questions didn’t stop. Why now? What were they looking for? What would this become?

People weren’t just afraid of losing jobs. They were afraid of losing the compass.

Because when the scaffolding collapses—when the ethic is drained out of the infrastructure—what’s left might answer phones. It might file forms. But it no longer knows why it exists.

And still, no hearings. No cameras. No floor speeches. Just good people gone.

It’s easy to say this was about savings. Or streamlining. But that’s the lie history will catch. Because if it were about savings, they wouldn’t target the leanest office in government. If it were about reform, they wouldn’t gut the memory required to reform anything. This wasn’t oversight. This was overwrite.

And the most dangerous kind of overwrite is the one done in silence.

That’s what makes it dangerous. Because what remains looks like the Peace Corps. It has a nameplate. A mission statement. But it no longer remembers why it mattered.

And when memory dies, the mission doesn’t just weaken. It wanders.

When Legacy No Longer Matters

Diplomacy is not what you say—it’s whether you stay.

You can’t measure presence in a spreadsheet. But you know when it’s gone.

You know it in the voice on the other end of the phone line, waiting for a volunteer who isn’t coming. You know it in a chalkboard untouched, a garden unwatered, a promise unmet.

In Tonga, Samoa, and Malawi, the only American presence for decades wasn’t military—it was human. Peace Corps Volunteers who lived on dirt floors, taught in sweltering rooms, listened more than they spoke.

When DOGE came through, they didn’t just cut programs. They broke presence. They broke continuity. They broke trust.

And trust, once broken, doesn’t return on demand.

In Samoa, a school director named Fale called the Peace Corps office three times, each time asking the same quiet question: When would the math teacher arrive? The line always rang, the answer never came.

A former president of Malawi once said that Peace Corps Volunteers “have been instrumental in our development efforts, bringing knowledge, skills, and a spirit of collaboration that has benefited our communities.” That was never written in a budget. But it lived in the soil, in the rhythm of daily life, in what came after.

I’ve worked in Kasai Province, in eastern Congo, in the Central African Republic, and deep into rural Uganda. And no matter where I went, there was always someone—an elder, a shopkeeper, a young man who’d taught himself English—who asked, “Do you know Peace Corps?”

Only, they never said Corps. They said Corpse, like a dead body. It always made me laugh.

“Do you know Teacher John?” they’d ask. “He helped me build fishponds. He taught me science.”

They never knew their last names. But they might remember a state—“John from California,” or “Mary from New York”—as if that were enough to find them. They remembered how one of them rode a bike into town, just like they did. They remembered the Americans who lived among them, listened to them, and left pieces of their hearts behind.

That memory doesn’t leave when the volunteer boards the plane. It lives on—in gardens, in classrooms, in the way someone stands up to speak English in a room that doesn’t expect it. And sometimes, when I found myself in danger or confusion or need, it was that memory—Do you know Teacher John?—that opened the door, that extended the hand.

That is the power of Peace Corps. Not as a program. As a presence. Not as an institution. As a bond.

Peace Corps was our softest power. It didn’t surveil. It didn’t sell. It didn’t conquer. It held the crying child. It learned the language. And it stayed.

That mattered. Not just for them. For us.

Because Peace Corps wasn’t just a service program. It was a witness. A way of saying, we were here—not for profit, not for politics, but for people.

And now that witness is fading. Quietly. Without scandal. Without trial.

Trust has a half-life. It decays when unreturned. It doesn’t scream when it dies. It just stops showing up.

The lights didn’t go out all at once. They dimmed. They flickered. And then we told ourselves they’d never been on.

What We Built Wasn’t a Program. It Was a Claim.

And now that claim is being retracted.

You can count desks. You can measure headcount. You can slash with executive orders and call it reform. But what’s leaving the Peace Corps isn’t numbers. It’s memory.

Not the kind you archive. The kind that lives in people—in the recruiter who knew how to spot a volunteer who would last. In the country director who knew which post needed time to heal. In the regional officer who’d stayed long enough to remember when the coup came, and how to get people out when it did.

That’s what’s walking out the door. That’s what we’re losing.

Returned volunteer Suzanne McCloskey said it plainly: “The whole Peace Corps experience has been a blessing and an inspiration that allowed me to work for causes I feel strongly about, including women’s health, gender empowerment, and developing leadership skills in youth.”

That’s not a side effect. That’s the program. That’s the point.

Because Peace Corps never promised transformation. But it made space for it.

One of the greatest transformations any volunteer can undergo is realizing that they will never return the same person. Many of us arrive in our villages full of ideas—some come with fresh diplomas, others with the untested confidence of twenty-four years of life. We think we’re there to teach. But what quickly becomes clear is that we’re the ones being taught.

Taught that kindness doesn’t come from wealth. That hospitality often lives in the places with the least to give. That friendship can form under a tin roof, beside a smoky fire, in languages we’re still learning. That the people who’ve been farming the land for thousands of years know more than any textbook ever told us.

And slowly, we shed something. Our assumptions. Our formulas. Our imagined expertise. We become quieter. More patient. More human.

We witness poverty up close. We see corruption that textbooks sanitized. We live under mosquito nets, eat from shared pots, and learn how to survive scarcity—not with panic, but with community.

And in that process, we carry something back. We return with a kind of emotional fluency that no classroom could have given us. We bring that into our careers, our families, our city councils, our classrooms, our clinics. We return not just as Americans—but as listeners, as witnesses, as people who chose discomfort in order to learn love.

Even President Jimmy Carter’s family carried that covenant. His mother, Lillian, joined the Peace Corps at 68, serving in India. Years later, his grandson would do the same in South Africa. That’s what this program did—it stitched service into families. It wasn’t abstract. It was passed down like stories, like values, like names.

It didn’t scale. It didn’t pivot. It didn’t optimize.

It just stayed.

And when volunteers came home, they came home speaking humility in more than one language. And they used it—in classrooms, courtrooms, city halls.

They became teachers who knew when not to speak.

Public defenders who knew which silences meant fear.

Social workers who had lived without running water.

Mayors who understood the value of staying.

What we’re dismantling now isn’t overhead. It’s ethos.

We’re tearing out one of the ligaments that held our ideals to the ground.

You can’t outsource that. You can’t contract it out.

You either believe in it—or you bury it.

This Isn’t Downsizing. It’s Disarmament.

We are dismantling the last peaceful tools we have left.

This isn’t a shutdown. It’s a hollowing.

They didn’t kill the Peace Corps. They haven’t changed it yet—but they’ve already made it doubt what it was built to be.

The volunteers are still in the field—for now. But the spine is gone. The trainers, the placement officers, the veterans who could see trouble before it came—that architecture is vanishing, one resignation letter at a time.

And Peace Corps isn’t the only one bleeding.

AmeriCorps—gutted. Its grants erased, its service terms terminated. The American Climate Corps—shut down in winter. The USDA’s Black college scholarships—suspended. Farm-to-school programs—defunded. The Local Food for Schools initiative—signed away with the stroke of a pen.

None of it was broken. All of it was working. And that was the threat.

This isn’t reform. It’s doctrine. A doctrine that says if a program doesn’t profit, it perishes. If it doesn’t scale, it’s obsolete. If it dares to center people over capital, it becomes a target.

This is not about money. It’s about meaning.

It’s easy to attack the Peace Corps when you’ve never served. Easy to slash AmeriCorps when you’ve never received support in your rural clinic or on your struggling farm. It’s easy to undermine USAID when you’ve never seen a community survive because of an HIV grant or a food security program. Just like it’s easy to mock career diplomats or cut veterans’ benefits when you’ve never worn the uniform or walked the long, uncertain road of service.

The rhetoric always arrives dressed as efficiency. But it’s ignorance, weaponized as righteousness. And when it wins, it doesn’t just dismantle programs. It destroys the very soul of what this country stands for.

So the question becomes: the people throwing the punches—have they ever signed up? Have they ever sworn an oath? Have they ever stayed for two years, lived on the margin, and served without spotlight or salary?

If the answer is no, then the verdict is already written.

President Obama said it best: “We need diplomats and businessmen and women, and Peace Corps volunteers… We need you.”

That “you” was never theoretical. It was real. It was 7,000 volunteers in 60 countries. It was presence over pretense. And it is fading now, not with fire, but with forgetfulness.

And the erosion isn’t just felt abroad. When we dismantle service, we shrink the citizenship we claim to value.

Imagine if we’d gone the other way. Doubled down on service. Scaled up Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, the Climate Corps. Sent thousands more into classrooms, clinics, farms, and forests. What might have changed? What might we have healed? What kind of country might we have become?

And yet, even now, it still doesn’t need our defense.

It only needs us to remember why we built it in the first place.

It needs those who served—and the families who sent them.

It needs the communities who welcomed them, the classrooms, companies, and clinics changed by their return.

It needs the universities, the school boards, the city councils, and the government agencies filled with those who learned humility through hardship and brought it home.

And it needs decent Americans—those who’ve served in other ways, and those who’ve never served at all—to stand up and say: this still matters.

Because if we can no longer defend something as human as the Peace Corps, then maybe we were never worthy of it to begin with.