Peace Corps isn’t nearly serving to others − it’s a key a part of US public diplomacy

Since President Donald Trump returned to the White Home in January 2025, his administration has slashed the work of many U.S. authorities businesses, together with these targeted on international coverage. Now, there’s concern that the Peace Corps may be part of the opposite international assist packages the administration is making an attempt to dismantle.

America 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 doable 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 “vital restructuring efforts.”

The Peace Corps instructed The New York Occasions in an April 28 assertion that “the company will stay operational and proceed to recruit, place, and prepare volunteers, whereas persevering with to assist their well being, security and safety, and efficient service.”

As a scholar of worldwide affairs, I feel it is very important perceive the refined – however necessary – function that the Peace Corps performs in serving to the U.S. preserve a optimistic worldwide picture.

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 corporation that lacked innovation, staffed by self-serving folks with out a lot sensible expertise.

Because the Sixties, the Peace Corps has despatched greater than 240,000 U.S. residents – a lot of them younger folks – to work as volunteers in additional than 60 low- and middle-income international locations on short-term tasks, starting from instructing college students English to serving to farmers improve their meals manufacturing. This works out to about 3,500 to 4,000 volunteers overseas annually.

As Kennedy hoped, many of those American volunteers returned house to finally serve within the State Division, with some rising to the highest ranks, equivalent to Christopher Hill, a profession diplomat who served within the Peace Corps in Cameroon within the Seventies.

Peace Corps volunteers, typically often called PCVs, additionally go on to work in different kinds of public service, together with in instructional roles. It has additionally been widespread for former Peace Corps volunteers to work for USAID.

Peace Corps’ function in US authorities

The Peace Corps isn’t 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 internationally.

The Peace Corps, with a US$495 million annual funds, does contribute to U.S. international coverage targets by enhancing U.S. comfortable energy. Delicate energy, on this context, means getting others to need what you need.

The political scientist Joseph Nye launched the tutorial idea of sentimental energy to the mainstream within the early Nineties. It’s typically misunderstood. Some mistakenly seek advice from the navy 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 international locations has proven that the presence of a Peace Corps program improves the favored notion of the U.S. amongst communities there. A great repute 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 software course of to recruit People of all ages to volunteer for 2 years out of the country, doing completely different sorts of service work starting from agriculture and training to well being and the atmosphere.

Most are youthful folks with faculty levels, however there’s no 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 stay and work in a group that has requested a volunteer to assist with several types of actions. This might embody serving to native ladies arrange their very own small companies in Panama or providing well being workshops on lowering the danger of contracting and spreading HIV in Eswatini, previously knwon as Swaziland. These volunteers are often *the one People for miles round.

Volunteers are anticipated to stay modestly and are paid a month-to-month dwelling allowance that covers their naked requirements.

Volunteers’ work isn’t straightforward and never with out danger. Since 1961, 311 folks have died whereas serving. A lot of the deaths are resulting from 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 named grassroots improvement in international assist circles. Which means that a Peace Corps volunteer tries to make use of native cash and experience to attain 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 isn’t supposed to vary the trajectory of a rustic’s financial improvement and all of a sudden 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 equivalent to spinach and mustard greens. Dominicans didn’t historically eat these greens, however I bought my neighbors and associates to strive them. Some realized to essentially like them and commenced to develop them on their very own.

One other form 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 “a possibility to emphasise a special a part of our American character,” as an alternative of the concept that the U.S. is a “harsh, narrow-minded militaristic, materialistic society.”

The Trump administration tends to view international help packages as open-ended charity packages that have to be eradicated.

I imagine that international help packages aren’t charity – they’re public diplomacy instruments that contribute to the U.S.’s international energy. If the Peace Corps is eradicated, the U.S. will lose one other necessary device of international coverage.