About a month ago we reported that a complex funding snafu had led AmeriCorps to close its doors to new volunteers. We called on the President and Congressional appropriators to come to the rescue by providing the national service program with the money to reopen the doors and to achieve the significant expansion the President so notably called for in his 2002 State of the Union Address.

Since then, the situation has gotten worse, as the Progressive Policy Institute's Marc Magee explains in detail in a new policy backgrounder.

In its fiscal year 2003 omnibus appropriations bill, Congress shifted a big chunk of AmeriCorps funds over to the trust fund for post-service education awards in order to cover last year's funding snafu. That resulted in a 30 percent cut in the funds needed to run AmeriCorps itself. The practical result of this budgetary slight-of-hand is a significant shrinkage in the overall program to levels last seen in 1994 -- from last year's 59,000 participants to about 28,000. Adding insult to injury, Senate appropriators (led by long-time AmeriCorps opponent Sen. Kit Bond of MO) added language that for the first time would cap the total number of AmeriCorps volunteers at 50,000 -- a level well below last year's ranks, and far below the expanded AmeriCorps called for by the President.

All this has happened without any public comment -- or, best as we can tell, any private action -- by the White House. This silence compounds the Administration's refusal last year to expend any effort whatsoever to keep House Republicans from killing legislation reauthorizing AmeriCorps and its parent Corporation for National Service -- a reauthorization needed to expand service opportunities while incorporating important reforms contained in the bipartisan Bayh-McCain Call to Service Act.

If nothing else happens, the President will have promised a 50 percent expansion in AmeriCorps opportunities for young people, and will have delivered instead a 50 percent cut.

What makes this malign neglect really maddening is the evidence that the President's own call for Americans to "give something back" contributed to a big jump in the number of young Americans clamoring to sign up for AmeriCorps. The money needed to expand AmeriCorps to the levels called for by the President is infinitesimal compared to the new tax cuts under consideration by Congress at the Administration's request. Or to measure the needed funds another way, they are pocket change in our negotiations with Turkey to ensure that country's participation in a war to liberate Iraq.

Much as we want young Turks to help Uncle Sam, we think it's pretty important to let young Americans help their own Uncle as well. Despite the President's nice rhetoric on national service, he has done nothing tangible to aid the cause. The one good thing that's happened -- enactment in last year's defense bill of the "citizen-soldier" provisions of the Bayh-McCain bill -- occurred without any involvement from the White House.

In the end, we don't know if the AmeriCorps funding crisis is more about the strange and abiding enmity toward national service exhibited by conservative Republicans -- an enmity so deep that normally subservient members of Congress are willing to defy their own President -- or about the President's refusal to expend an ounce of political capital to redeem his own rhetoric.

Either way, supporters of national service need to fight back. There will almost certainly be a supplemental appropriations bill going through Congress soon, in part to pay for the likely military action against Iraq. It would be a good time to revive a national debate about the need to call on all Americans to give something back to their community and their country, and an even better time for the Administration to wake up and make a patriotic appeal to its own party in Congress for new national service opportunities.

Here's how Marc Magee sums it up: "As the surge in enrollment in national service programs has demonstrated, in a time of great national challenges, Americans are eager to do their part. What is needed now is for the nation's leaders to do theirs."