Assailed by right and left, the Peace Corps continues to make an apolitical difference
The volunteer government aid agency is based on the proposition that bringing different people together in peaceful cooperation can help them thrive.
In 1983, I finished college and joined the Peace Corps. I was sent to Nepal, where I taught English in a remote village. To get there, you took an overnight bus out of Kathmandu and then walked for three days into the Himalayan foothills.
My Peace Corps journey changed my life. It opened my eyes to cultural differences, and it taught me how to communicate across them. That’s been an invaluable tool for me, as an educator and a human being.
But when I got to graduate school, I discovered that many of my fellow left-leaning students — and some of their professors — had a decidedly less rosy view of the Peace Corps. It was a neocolonial project, they said, designed to enhance America’s global power and to keep poorer countries in perpetual dependency.
I’ve been thinking about their comments over the past few days, as news spread that U.S. Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) had proposed to eliminate funding for the Peace Corps under amendments he submitted to a House appropriations bill. The York congressman was also an ardent supporter of Elon Musk’s dismantling of USAID, which Perry called a “piggy bank for far-left causes.”
Yet the Peace Corps — like USAID — has also been the target of left-wing attacks, which bear a strong echo to Republican ones. Neither side believes that Americans can be a force for good in the world.
That’s why the Peace Corps matters. It’s based on the simple proposition that bringing different people together can help them thrive. And it’s a standing rebuke to cynics on the right and the left.
Going back to Richard Nixon, GOP politicians have tried to diminish — or destroy – the Peace Corps. Their last effort to zero it out took place in 2019, when Rep. Mark Walker (R.-N.C.) proposed to “put America first” by defunding the Peace Corps and devoting the saved dollars to disaster relief at home.
Never mind that the Peace Corps represents 1% of our foreign aid budget, which is usually about 1% of total government spending. That means one out of every 10,000 federal dollars goes to the Peace Corps.
But that’s too much for Perry, who has also proposed eliminating government funding for the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which finances infrastructure and anti-poverty programs in poor countries, and for the Democracy Fund, which aids nascent democracies that are under strain.
America’s own democracy is under strain, of course, thanks to the likes of Perry. As his text messages showed, he tried to assist Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He’s also facing a tough re-election battle this fall against Democratic challenger Janelle Stelson, whom he narrowly defeated in 2024.
Perry is betting that his campaign to defund the Peace Corps and other foreign aid will help him at the polls, and I hope he’s wrong. But I also think it’s wrong to dismiss the Peace Corps as an imperial power grab, as my grad-student colleagues did.
That critique has been revived in the digital age by "No White Saviors," a social-media campaign begun in 2018. When the Peace Corps evacuated all of its volunteers during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, No White Saviors said they should stay home.
“No more pretending inexperienced young people are actually useful in countries and cultures they are alien to,” No White Saviors declared. “No more spending money on flights or evacuations, no need to teach language or culture.”
That demand was taken up within the Peace Corps itself. Calling themselves "Decolonizing Peace Corps," disillusioned volunteers called for the abolition of the agency. The Peace Corps was a scam, they said, spending scarce resources that could be better used at home.
Scott Perry and Mark Walker couldn’t have put it better themselves. Whatever their other differences, America-First Republicans and No White Saviors think the Peace Corps is a waste of taxpayer dollars.
My Peace Corps journey changed my life. It opened my eyes to cultural differences, and it taught me how to communicate across them.
Please. The 250,000 people who have served in the agency have generated enormous goodwill overseas and huge benefits at home. More than 80% of them continue to volunteer in their communities. A quarter of them have started businesses.
They’re also more diverse than No White Saviors assumes. In 1990, four years after I returned from Nepal, only 7% of volunteers were nonwhite; in 2020, 34% were.
I didn’t go to Nepal to save anyone. I went to live, and to learn, and to grow. And 25 years later, I returned to my village with my 17-year-old daughter. A bus road had been cut into the hills, so the three-day walk was narrowed to about six hours.
The school where I taught held an impromptu “welcome home” ceremony for us. I stood up to give a speech in my broken Nepali, but broke down in tears, overwhelmed by my good fortune to have known these good people. If we jettison the Peace Corps, fewer Americans will experience that kind of connection. I just don’t see how that can be good for America, or for the world.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Schooling Citizens: How Education Can Save Democracy,” which will be published next spring by the American Philosophical Society Press.
Inquirer Opinion Newsletter
