Rivera’s nonprofit manages AmeriCorps programs in about 30 educational and disaster relief organizations in the region — including 826 Valencia. He had the unfortunate job of informing the roughly 600 AmeriCorps members he oversees that their positions had been cut, effective immediately.
That included a group that was dispatched to Los Angeles after the devastating January wildfires and has been there since to help with recovery efforts.
“I think that one to me is almost the most heartbreaking,” said Rivera, who’s been involved with AmeriCorps since the agency’s inception in 1994. “These folks lived in hotels for months, serving people at their lowest moments, not making a lot of money, and then get an email saying the federal government has cut your grant. That their service was no longer needed or wanted.”
Even after watching the Trump administration ransack other government agencies, Rivera said he never expected AmeriCorps, a program that has always garnered bipartisan support, to be on the chopping block.
“It’s in red states, it’s in blue states. It’s in rural counties, it’s in urban counties,” he said. “AmeriCorps is everywhere.”
The disruption to AmeriCorps comes after the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency on April 25 quietly ordered the national service agency to cancel nearly $400 million in grants — about 40% of its remaining funding — which paid for its members’ stipends, health care and education awards.
“It has been determined that the award no longer meets agency priorities and you must immediately cease all award activities,” AmeriCorps wrote in an email on April 27 to national and regional organizations that help distribute grant funding, according to communications shared with KQED. “This is a final agency action, and it is not administratively appealable.”
The cuts have already prompted a number of local nonprofits to scale back or fully suspend their services, including some garden programs in San Francisco schools that AmeriCorps members primarily staff.
Across the country, the sudden termination could shutter more than 1,000 programs and cut short the terms of over 32,000 service members, who will immediately lose their health care benefits and only receive a percentage of the education grants they had been promised, according to America’s Service Commissions, a nonprofit organization that helps support AmeriCorps programs.
AmeriCorps did not respond to KQED’s request for comment.
Several states, including California, which has long been one of the biggest recipients of the AmeriCorps grants, had their entire funding cut, ASC said.
