The American Climate Corps is over. What even was it?

Giorgio Zampaglione loved his two-hour commute from the town of Mount Shasta into the surrounding northern California forests last summer. The way the light filtered through the trees on the morning drive was unbeatable, he said. He ate lunch with his crew, members of the new Forest Corps program, deep in the woods, usually far from cell service. They thinned thickets of trees and cleared brush, helping prevent the spread of fires by removing manzanita — a very flammable, shoulder-high shrub — near campsites and roads. 

“The Forest Service people have been super, super happy to have us,” Zampaglione said. “They’re always saying, ‘Without you guys, this would have taken months.’” 

Zampaglione, now 27 years old, had previously worked analyzing environmental data and mapping, but he was looking to do something more hands-on. Then he saw an ad on YouTube for the Forest Corps and applied through the AmeriCorps site. He didn’t realize until his first week on the job last summer that he was part of the first class of the American Climate Corps, an initiative started by President Joe Biden to get young people working in jobs that reduce carbon dioxide emissions and protect communities from weather disasters.

It also appears to be the Climate Corps’ last class, as the Biden administration has quietly been winding down the program ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20. “It’s officially over,” said Dana Fisher, a professor at American University who has been researching climate service projects for AmeriCorps. “​​The people who were responsible for coordinating it have left office or are leaving office. Before they go, they are shutting it all down.”

Think of it as a precautionary step. When Trump takes over, any federal program with “climate” in the name will likely have a target on it. Republican politicians have fiercely opposed the idea of the Climate Corps ever since Biden proposed it at the start of his term in 2021, with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky blasting the notion of spending billions of dollars on a “made-up government work program” that would essentially provide busywork for “young liberal activists.”

But the American Climate Corps’ thousands of members across the country will keep their jobs, at least for the time being. That’s in part because the Climate Corps isn’t exactly the government jobs program people think it is. Environmental advocates hyped the corps’ creation as a “major win for the climate movement,” while news headlines declared that it would create 20,000 jobs. But the Climate Corps didn’t employ people directly — it was actually a loose network of mostly preexisting positions across a slew of nonprofits, state and local governments, and federal agencies, with many different sources of funding. Take away the “American Climate Corps,” and little changes. The jobs survive, even if the branding doesn’t.

“People say it’s the American Climate Corps, but like, what does that mean?” said Robert Godfried, the program manager for the recently launched Maryland Climate Corps, part of the larger network. “There isn’t really any meat on those bones.”

Some of the jobs roped into the American Climate Corps have funding locked down for much of Trump’s term. Zampaglione’s program, the Forest Corps, has $15 million in funding from the U.S. Forest Service that should last it five years, according to Ken Goodson, the director of AmeriCorps NCCC, which recruits young adults for public service. 

Other federal agencies, however, will likely see funding cuts that hit these climate jobs, especially as Elon Musk has promised to cut $2 trillion from the government’s budget — about one-third of existing spending — as co-lead of Trump’s proposed Department of Government Efficiency, aka DOGE. 

“The big challenge,” Fisher said, “is going to be a question having to do with funding for these federal programs, and the degree to which they’re going to be even allowed to say ‘climate.’”

The American Climate Corps was supposed to be a New Deal-era program brought back to life. In Biden’s first days as president, he called for a Civilian Climate Corps that would employ hundreds of thousands of young people across the country. The vision was inspired by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps — which put about 3 million men to work outdoors during the Great Depression, planting trees and building trails — but reimagined for the needs of the 21st century. Young people would get paid to protect neighborhoods from fires and floods and learn trade skills for installing heat pumps, solar panels, and electric vehicle chargers, building up a workforce that could accelerate the United States toward a cleaner future.

The idea had been inserted into Biden’s platform in the run-up to the 2020 election, a result of some olive-branch efforts to reach progressive voters after Senator Bernie Sanders dropped out of the Democratic primary. The party’s task force on climate policy, including Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Varshini Prakash from the youth-led Sunrise Movement, recommended a climate corps, and it reportedly caught Biden’s attention. Young activists were enthusiastic about the possibility. In May 2021, members of the Sunrise Movement marched 266 miles across California to pressure Congress to pass funding for the program, from Paradise, a town almost completely destroyed by a wildfire in 2018, to San Francisco.

But the New Deal-inspired jobs program seemed to lose resonance as unemployment recovered from its huge spike during the 2020 lockdowns, and power in the labor market shifted toward employees in 2021, the year of the “Great Resignation.” While the Democratic-controlled House managed to pass $30 billion to start a Climate Corps in late 2021, as part of Biden’s Build Back Better bill, it didn’t make it past the divided Senate. Money for the Climate Corps got cut out of the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate law that passed in 2022, during negotiations. By early 2023, with Republicans taking control of the House from Democrats, the vision of reviving the Civilian Conservation Corps looked dead.

Then, that September, the Biden administration surprise-announced that the American Climate Corps was happening after all — but scaled back. Instead of creating 300,000 jobs, the new version, authorized through an executive order, aimed to put 20,000 members to work in its first year. Some saw the move as a sort of marketing effort to rally young voters, whose support for Biden had dropped after his administration had cleared the way for the Willow oil project in Alaska, ahead of Biden’s campaign for reelection in 2024.

“I think the title American Climate Corps was really the Biden administration sort of placating, looking for younger votes,” said Jeff Parker, executive director of the Northwest Youth Corps. “During early conversations, many of us, myself included, were in conversations where we were really asking for the word ‘resiliency’ to replace the word ‘climate,’ just because it’s a hot issue. And they were like, ‘Well, of course it’s hot. That’s why we want it, because that’s who we’re trying to market this to.’” (Officials from the Biden administration did not agree to an interview for this article, despite several requests.)

After the Climate Corps’ official announcement, a pressing question loomed: How on Earth do you create 20,000 jobs without any money from Congress? “There are no new appropriated dollars for American Climate Corps,” confirmed Michael Smith, CEO of AmeriCorps, the independent federal agency tasked with becoming the hub for the American Climate Corps. The White House formed an interagency group to figure out how to bring climate programs together, because without funding, the obvious path was to take advantage of what was already out there.

Climate service programs had been expanding independently, across agencies in the federal government and also through nonprofits and state and local governments. AmeriCorps, for example, had moved almost $160 million toward its environmental work, including trail restoration and urban forestry, before the national initiative was up and running, Smith said.

“What the American Climate Corps did was look at all programs that were currently involved in that type of land management and conservation work. And instead of everybody sort of being off in their own space, doing those efforts, helped bring them together under the American Climate Corps umbrella,” said Goodson, the director of AmeriCorps NCCC.

Even though the Climate Corps didn’t get any help from Congress, it found resources in other places. The MacArthur Foundation, which often funds climate projects, gave a $500,000 grant to AmeriCorps last year to support it. Meanwhile, corps programs within the larger network used existing funding from federal agencies and supported some of their work with money from the bipartisan infrastructure law in 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act.

The American Climate Corps jobs site appeared last April, directing anyone interested to apply for positions on the sites of the network’s partners. Since the jobs weren’t centralized, term limits and pay were all over the place. Nonetheless, the first cohort was sworn in virtually in June 2023. In talking to organizers of programs that had been bundled into the national network, Fisher encountered confusion about their status as part of the American Climate Corps. “Some of them recounted being told last-minute about opportunities to be sworn in and told that they could get a T-shirt,” she said.

The White House claimed that it had gathered 15,000 members by last September, but the way this number got presented was somewhat misleading, because most of these jobs aren’t new jobs, or even jobs created by the federal government. The positions just came with a new label.

“I think they can claim that there are 15,000 young people doing climate-related work under this umbrella, but I think it would be disingenuous if they called those new or added jobs,” Parker said. His Northwest Youth Corps accounted for roughly 300 positions with the American Climate Corps across Washington, Oregon, and Idaho.

Even some of the jobs that were new can’t be attributed directly to the Climate Corps. The Forest Corps program that Zampaglione is participating in, for example, was set in motion about a year before Biden established the national corps. According to Goodson, the U.S. Forest Service had asked AmeriCorps to help with reforestation and managing wildfires, as well as training up a new generation of land conservation workers. Funded by the Forest Service, 80 Forest Corps members started their terms last July. “When the American Climate Corps was announced and launched, the timing was such that it really lined up with the Forest Corps program coming together,” Goodson said.

Another program that recently launched, the Maryland Climate Corps, wouldn’t have happened without that state’s governor, Wes Moore. The Democratic governor made creating a service-year option for young people a priority once he took office in 2023, said Godfried, the manager of Maryland’s climate corps. Some of the money for the 40-person program comes from the state, and the rest comes all the way across the country from the California Volunteers Fund, affiliated with California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office. That fund, in turn, is supported by AmeriCorps and philanthropic donors.

“California Volunteers Fund, in my mind, is actually one of the unsung heroes of this movement,” Godfried said. The program, along with AmeriCorps, is helping to establish state-level efforts modeled after the California Climate Action Corps, which launched in 2020 and has put tens of thousands of volunteers to work planting trees, fighting food waste, and making communities more resilient to wildfires. The effort has expanded to a dozen other states: Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Carolina, Utah, Vermont, and Washington. The state level, Godfried said, “is where the action is.”

Credit for this nationwide expansion of climate service work should go to the many governors’ offices that have been working hard to create these jobs, Godfried said. Yet the American Climate Corps is what gets people’s attention. “When the White House does something, everyone wants to report on it,” he said. “When I do something, when the folks in state government do, to be frank, no one really cares that much.”

So the New Deal-style climate jobs program that Biden envisioned never really materialized — but the cobbled-together, low-budget version wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. The White House’s megaphone brought public attention to the fact that you can volunteer to help address climate change and get paid for it. Climate Corps members have replaced old fluorescent lights with energy-efficient LEDs, put solar panels on homes, and educated kids about the effects of a warming planet.

The people managing these efforts say that their participation in the national network increased their visibility, bringing in more applicants through the federal jobs site. The Forest Corps, for example, got 800 applications for just 80 positions, according to Goodson.

This kind of work won’t end under the Trump administration, though it has already put a damper on ambitions to expand it. “The American Climate Corps will evaporate as a Biden initiative, as if it never happened, because it really didn’t get the runway to take off,” Parker said. 

The effects of Trump’s presidency could also trickle down to the state-level climate corps. Many leaders were hoping to supplement their existing funding with federal money that no longer looks like it’ll be coming, Fisher said. Governor Moore has said he’ll trim $2 billion out of Maryland’s budget and cut environmental projects that he thinks won’t get federal support from a Trump White House, though he hasn’t said anything about the Climate Corps specifically.

Parker asked for the Northwest Youth Corps to be taken off the Climate Corps site, because he was worried that the affiliation might jeopardize his funding, which has historically received bipartisan support, given Trump’s hostility to climate initiatives. A lot of organizations, he said, just want to put the American Climate Corps behind them and not attract too much attention so that their work will survive without the Biden-era branding.

After all, the idea of creating programs to fight fires, plant trees, and do conservation work modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps doesn’t need to be a partisan issue. Polls show it has cross-party appeal: One from 2020 found that 84 percent of Republican voters, compared to just 78 percent of Democratic voters, were in favor of starting these kinds of corps at the state level. But that Republican support for the general idea dropped dramatically after Biden announced his national program that swapped “climate” for “conservation” in the name. “In our current political climate, it just has sort of been collateral damage,” Parker said.

The irony is that the work that the American Climate Corps promised is needed more than ever. “Climate shocks are going to come, and they’re going to come more and more frequently with more severity,” Fisher said. “We need communities to be prepared and capable of responding. And service corps programs are a wonderful way to do that.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The American Climate Corps is over. What even was it? on Jan 15, 2025.