Chuck Grassley: “I suggested to the President that he, according to this chart, consider the fact that he has 20,000 volunteers of…”

“I suggested to the President that he, according to this chart, consider the fact that he has 20,000 volunteers of AmeriCorps; and we have got 3.9 million Americans who volunteer. These are young people, volunteers who do not worry about getting paid anything for volunteerism. A second thing that the President should consider is that for one AmeriCorps worker we can finance 18 low-income people to go to college with a Pell grant. Those are some alternatives that the President ought to think about as he has a news conference today to expose what he says is playing politics with his program. When I make a suggestion to the President that he reinvent the program according to his own definition of how that program should be financed and operated, I mean reinvent it. Just do what the President of the United States said the program was going to cost and who it was going to benefit or it will be lost. I speak as a person who wants no playing of politics, but as a person who wants to make sure that the taxpayers' dollars are used well, whether it is in AmeriCorps or whether it is in a defense program.”