AmeriCorps Survives at Stunted Level : Budget: The program Clinton is ‘most proud of’ avoids elimination. But the GOP’s allotment prevents any growth in national service plan.

President Clinton’s national service program appears to have survived elimination at the hands of Republican budget-cutters but the volunteer program’s growth has been permanently stunted by the new GOP majority in Congress.

While the recent debate over the future of AmeriCorps has been couched in fiscal terms, the real battle is ideological and political. The President, for the time being at least, has lost.

Clinton describes national service, which provides higher education grants and a small stipend in exchange for a year of volunteer service, as “the program I’m most proud of.”

He has proposed spending nearly $2 billion over three years to bring 100,000 young volunteers into AmeriCorps. It now appears that the program will receive about half the requested funds as Congress scours the federal government for politically acceptable budget savings.

Clinton has vowed to resist efforts to gut the national service program but it is not certain whether he will veto a $13-billion package of budget cuts now before Congress that includes a large cut in the volunteer program.

“The AmeriCorps program is giving thousands of young Americans a chance to serve their communities, serve their country and earn money for higher education,” the President told visiting college students Thursday. “I don’t believe we need to trade in our future for what is a piddling amount on the deficit but will have an enormous negative symbolic and substantive impact on what we’re trying to do in this country.”

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But Clinton’s very enthusiasm for national service and the high cost of the untested idea have made the program a too-tempting target for Republican opponents.

“Because the President and his people made it so high-profile, it became an easy target for attack,” said Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands), who chairs the House Appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the program. He made it plain that Republican objections to AmeriCorps are at heart political rather than fiscal. “They talked too loudly and too early. They got what they asked for.”

On Friday, the Senate Appropriations committee voted to cut $210 million from the current year budget of the Corporation for National Service, AmeriCorps’ parent, essentially freezing it at last year’s spending level of $375 million.

The chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees national service said Friday that the Administration should expect no growth in the program next year.

Eli Segal, chairman of AmeriCorps, said that the budget freeze will cripple national service and represent a breach of contract with the program’s volunteers and would-be volunteers.

“Six months after it first opened its doors,” Segal told the House panel at a hearing Friday, “national service is facing a lockout.” He said that 1,000 volunteers would have to be sent home immediately because of the cuts in this year’s budget and that many thousands of potential participants would have to be turned away in the coming months.

He said that corporations, private charities and local governments, which have been planning to participate in AmeriCorps as sponsors of volunteers or as sites for service programs, would have to scale back their plans drastically or abandon them.

Segal warned that AmeriCorps-sponsored programs to tutor children, plant trees, assist police, counsel crime victims, feed the hungry and house the homeless would be halted. “These are devastating cuts,” he said.

But Lewis said that national service has been growing too big too fast and should be frozen in place until it proves its worth.

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“There are serious questions to be raised as to who are the beneficiaries of this program and who we should really be helping in times of economic difficulties,” Lewis said. “Budgets are strained everywhere and there are trade-offs to be made everywhere.”

The result: Instead of receiving $579 million this year and $828 million next year as Clinton has requested, national service will plateau at roughly the $375 million spent in 1994, Lewis said.

Projected participation of 33,000 volunteers in September and 47,000 next year would have to be scaled back to the current level of 20,000.

By comparison, there currently are 6,500 volunteers serving overseas in the Peace Corps, a 15-year high for the program launched by President John F. Kennedy, which was the model for Clinton’s AmeriCorps.