Since President Donald Trump returned to the White Home in January 2025, his administration has slashed the work of many U.S. authorities companies, together with these targeted on international coverage. Now, there’s concern that the Peace Corps might be a part of the opposite international support applications the administration is making an attempt to dismantle.
The US Company for Worldwide Improvement largely shut down in February and March 2025, with its workforce lowered from greater than 10,000 to fifteen folks on workers.
In early April 2025, members of Elon Musk’s Division of Authorities Effectivity confirmed up at Peace Corps headquarters in Washington, D.C., signaling potential cuts.
DOGE has additionally referred to as for lowering the variety of the Peace Corps’ 970 full-time workers who assist recruit and oversee the work of volunteers.
The Guardian reported on April 28 that the Peace Corps is providing workers a buyout, and that Peace Corps management expects “significant restructuring efforts.”
The Peace Corps advised The New York Occasions in an April 28 assertion that “the agency will remain operational and continue to recruit, place, and train volunteers, while continuing to support their health, safety and security, and effective service.”
As a scholar of worldwide affairs, I feel you will need to perceive the delicate – however vital – position that the Peace Corps performs in serving to the U.S. preserve a optimistic worldwide picture.
President John F. Kennedy greets Peace Corps volunteers on the White Home in August 1962.
Smith Assortment/Gado/Getty Pictures
Understanding the Peace Corps
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy created the Peace Corps, an unbiased company within the federal authorities, alongside USAID as a option 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 greater than 240,000 U.S. residents – lots of them younger folks – to work as volunteers in additional than 60 low- and middle-income nations on short-term initiatives, starting from instructing college students English to serving to farmers enhance their meals manufacturing. This works out to about 3,500 to 4,000 volunteers overseas every year.
As Kennedy hoped, many of those American volunteers returned dwelling to ultimately serve within the State Division, with some rising to the highest ranks, resembling Christopher Hill, a profession diplomat who served within the Peace Corps in Cameroon within the Seventies.
Peace Corps volunteers, typically generally known as PCVs, additionally go on to work in different varieties of public service, together with in instructional roles. It has additionally been widespread for former Peace Corps volunteers to work for USAID.
Peace Corps’ position in US authorities
The Peace Corps shouldn’t be a part of the day-to-day actions of U.S. international coverage in the identical method because the State Division, for instance, which has diplomatic missions the world over.
The Peace Corps, with a US$495 million annual funds, does contribute to U.S. international coverage targets by enhancing U.S. comfortable energy. Smooth energy, on this context, means getting others to need what you need.
The political scientist Joseph Nye launched the tutorial idea of soppy energy to the mainstream within the early Nineteen Nineties. It’s usually misunderstood. Some mistakenly check with the army as arduous energy, and financial and diplomatic instruments as comfortable energy.
However comfortable 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 favored notion of the U.S. amongst communities there. status fosters goodwill and helps the U.S. obtain its concrete international coverage targets, 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 assist for the U.S. in its work on the United Nations.
The Peace Corps’ expertise
The Peace Corps makes use of a really selective utility course of to recruit Individuals 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 atmosphere.
Most are youthful folks with faculty levels, however there is no such thing as a higher age restrict to qualify and no requirement of a faculty diploma to serve.
There is no such thing as a single Peace Corps expertise.
However all volunteers reside and work in a group that has requested a volunteer to assist with various kinds of actions. This might embrace serving to native girls arrange their very own small companies in Panama or providing well being workshops on lowering the chance of contracting and spreading HIV in Eswatini, previously knwon as Swaziland. These volunteers are often *the one Individuals for miles round.
Volunteers are anticipated to reside modestly and are paid a month-to-month residing allowance that covers their naked requirements.
Volunteers’ work shouldn’t be straightforward and never with out threat. Since 1961, 311 folks have died whereas serving. A lot of the deaths are attributable to accidents, often associated to transportation. Some have died from ailments and sickness, and some have been victims of homicide.
Peace Corps’ strategy to volunteer work
The Peace Corps emphasizes what is called grassroots growth in international support circles. Because of this a Peace Corps volunteer tries to make use of native cash and experience to realize targets collectively recognized by the group 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 shouldn’t be meant to vary the trajectory of a rustic’s financial growth and out of the blue 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 illustration vegetable backyard the place I grew nutritious greens resembling spinach and mustard greens. Dominicans didn’t historically eat these greens, however I received my neighbors and associates to strive them. Some discovered to essentially like them and commenced to develop them on their very own.
A Peace Corps volunteer teaches English to college students in Bucharest, Romania, within the Nineteen Nineties.
Paul Conklin/Getty Pictures
One other type of public diplomacy
When requested in 1962 how he noticed the connection of the Peace Corps to U.S. international coverage, Kennedy responded that he noticed the Peace Corps as “an opportunity to emphasize a different part of our American character,” as an alternative of the concept the U.S. is a “harsh, narrow-minded militaristic, materialistic society.”
The Trump administration tends to view international help applications as open-ended charity applications that should be eradicated.
I consider that international help applications should not charity – they’re public diplomacy instruments that contribute to the U.S.’s world energy. If the Peace Corps is eradicated, the U.S. will lose one other vital software of international coverage.
