Chuck Grassley: “we have recently heard in the news quite a bit about AmeriCorps, and that is President Clinton's new program on…”

“we have recently heard in the news quite a bit about AmeriCorps, and that is President Clinton's new program on voluntarism. As many of my colleagues know, I spent several months investigating this whole matter, and I continue to review and will continue to review for a long time into the future the merits of AmeriCorps. There has been bipartisan criticism of this program and this concept of so-called voluntarism. This administration seems to have learned nothing from its recent efforts to force a top-down solution to programs, for instance, like health care. The American people rejected at the ballot box last November a bureaucratic solution that the administration had for health care reform. Now the administration believes the answer to voluntarism is to have it driven from the top down. They want to bureaucratize voluntarism. In health care reform, they wanted to make the choice for each citizen's health care. In this program, they want to make the moral choice for each volunteer, and they want to pay him for that. That subverts the concept of voluntarism, in my view. It turns the notion of voluntarism on its head. Nevertheless, the administration wants to go forward despite the fact that 1.9 million Americans are already volunteering on their own and doing it without pay and they are doing it all over the United States because they are doing it by making their own moral choices within their own communities as they see the needs of those communities.”