Trump hasn't killed the Peace Corps. Can he save it?

In the anxious months of mid-2025, while the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, was dismantling USAID, fears mounted that another storied international affairs agency, the Peace Corps, would soon be on the chopping block. DOGE officials arrived at the Peace Corps in April and, as they had with USAID, gained access to its Washington, D.C. headquarters and internal systems. They were also, around the same time, wreaking havoc at AmeriCorps, the domestic volunteer service agency. “DOGE’s primary goal is to assess how efficiently an organization is operating, and the Peace Corps has always prioritized cost-effective practices,” the agency’s leaders at the time wrote to volunteers, adding, “we don’t yet know the outcome of the DOGE visit.” On Reddit, where Peace Corps volunteers regularly communicate about their service experience, some started sharing advice about what to do in the event they were all ordered to return home. Having witnessed what unfolded at USAID, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and other foreign assistance agencies that experienced something resembling a hostile takeover, the Peace Corps’ acting leaders sought to avoid a similar confrontation. In the weeks leading up to their arrival, the agency undertook extensive scenario planning exercises for how to welcome DOGE operatives and ensure they were provided with the equipment, information, and undisturbed working space they needed to do their job, according to internal emails obtained by Bloomberg. “Do NOT walk by the conference room to peek in,” instructed one email from the agency’s chief information officer, adding that “decorum and professionalism are expected.” Ten months later, the worst-case scenarios for the Peace Corps have not played out, with the agency continuing to recruit and deploy volunteers to more than 60 countries. DOGE — led by billionaire Elon Musk — did force staffing cuts, though the number of employees who were terminated or chose to leave through “deferred resignation” has not been made public. By July 2025, these reductions were already 90% complete, according to the agency’s 2026 performance plan. But while the agency’s political prospects appear brighter than they did last April — and a far cry from what has befallen USAID — the Peace Corps is hardly on solid ground. In fact, it hasn’t been for several years. Peace Corps’ volunteer numbers, which hovered above 7,000 six years ago, have never recovered from the unprecedented global evacuation it undertook in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Recruitment challenges are exacerbated by overly restrictive risk management policies and a service model in need of innovation, former senior officials told Devex. In stark contrast to the approach Musk and his operatives took at USAID — scouring the agency’s programs for anything that could be publicly weaponized against it — the Trump administration’s handling of the Peace Corps has, at least so far, suggested some level of support, rather than disdain. With the administration’s backing, the Peace Corps has challenged itself to more than double the number of volunteers currently deployed around the world. It sets up a make-or-break moment for an agency that was hobbled by the pandemic, scrutinized by DOGE, and is now under pressure to do more with less. “This is both an ambitious goal and a goal that we can achieve,” wrote Paul Shea, the agency’s then-acting CEO, in a message that was posted online by a Peace Corps alumni association in November. “We are setting a challenging goal because we are an agency that rises to the challenge,” he wrote. The Peace Corps did not respond to multiple inquiries from Devex. Shuffling the deck The Peace Corps has undergone two leadership reshufflings in the last six months, but neither has come with the acrimony that accompanied political takeovers of some other foreign assistance agencies during Trump’s second administration. In August, the agency’s acting CEO, acting deputy CEO, and acting chief of staff all stepped down to, according to an official announcement, “pave the way for a new leadership team to step in and guide the organizational transformations that will make Peace Corps stronger and more efficient in the long run.” But instead of replacing them with political ideologues, the Trump administration promoted two longtime Peace Corps employees and a member of the team who helped steer the agency through Trump’s transition into office. Shea, a veteran Peace Corps employee and former chief financial officer, took over as acting CEO after also serving as the agency’s lead representative to DOGE. While Trump officials vilified USAID’s leadership and workforce, the public announcement of the Peace Corps’ new leadership stated that the outgoing team “helped shape a vision and structure for a sustainable future for Peace Corps, and the Administration and the Agency thank them for their service and commitment.” Shortly after taking over, Shea announced internally a new agency goal to more than double the number of Peace Corps volunteers to 8,000 by 2030. “This Administration recognizes that reaching this target requires a multidisciplined approach,” he wrote in comments to the Peace Corps’ inspector general around the same time, noting that the agency's performance plan that supports these efforts is “aligned with direction from the Office of Management and Budget.” In January, the White House announced another leadership reshuffle, appointing Richard Swarttz as acting head of the agency and shifting Shea into a senior adviser role. Swarttz strikes a more political profile. He was the chief financial officer for the Republican Party of Florida for more than a decade and has connections to Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff. When they were both involved in high-level Republican politics, Swarttz once asked Wiles to help his wife get a job. “Richard has relationships in the administration, and he is really dedicated to the Peace Corps,” Glenn Blumhorst, former head of the National Peace Corps Association, told Devex. Swarttz will lead the agency until the president nominates — and the U.S. Senate confirms — a permanent director, but he is a candidate for that nomination, a well-connected Peace Corps expert who asked to remain anonymous told Devex. A more controversial figure, Tim Meisburger — a former USAID official who has alleged that U.S. foreign assistance was taken over by a “leftist agenda” — was appointed as a senior adviser at the agency in June. The Peace Corps did not respond to a question about whether Meisburger is still serving in that role. Whether this is the group that can return the Peace Corps to its former glory remains to be seen. In the process, they may have to grapple with some core questions about what it means to be a Peace Corps volunteer in 2026. Starting from zero The greatest threat facing the Peace Corps today may not be Musk or Trump, but rather the lingering damage inflicted by the COVID-19 pandemic and institutional roadblocks that have made it difficult to recover. In March 2020, with COVID-19 shutting down borders and overwhelming health facilities, the Peace Corps evacuated all of its more than 7,000 volunteers over the course of nine days, the first global evacuation in the agency’s history. In the wake of that unprecedented decision, the agency’s leaders took steps to keep the mission intact, including by piloting a virtual service program and by deploying a group of volunteers inside the United States to assist the Federal Emergency Management Agency with COVID-19 vaccination efforts. Two years after the evacuation, in March 2022, Peace Corps volunteers began to return to their overseas posts. Nearly four years later, it is still operating with roughly half the number of volunteers. One of the most common reasons people join the Peace Corps is knowing someone else who served and hearing about their experience. So when the Peace Corps sent all of its volunteers home, it also shut down its recruitment machine. “Volunteers beget volunteers,” a former senior Peace Corps official told Devex. “The more you have, the more you'll get.” “We've never been in a situation where we had to start again from zero, except for the founding of the Peace Corps,” they added. That has proven harder than expected. In its congressional budget justification for the 2025 fiscal year, the Peace Corps reported that “application numbers remain well below pre-pandemic levels and are insufficient to fully meet the robust demand for Volunteers worldwide,” while requesting additional funds for “targeted advertising” to improve the agency’s brand awareness. Volunteer recruitment challenges prompted a review by the Peace Corps’ inspector general, which was published in September 2025. The inspector general noted that volunteer shortages “have hampered the Peace Corps’ ability to meet host country requests” and “damaged” volunteers’ “relationships with community partners.” For example, in Guyana, the inspector general found that homestay families spent time and resources to meet the Peace Corps’ hosting requirements, only to not have enough volunteers arrive, causing them to forgo the benefits of hosting a volunteer. Staff in Madagascar told the inspector general that volunteer shortages had “limited the post’s programmatic reach and reduced the Peace Corps’ impact in a country with significant needs.” Staff also reported “a decline in morale, believing that fewer Volunteers may result in staffing cuts or the post’s closure,” according to the report. They also found that the agency “lacked the systems, personnel, and processes to address post-pandemic Volunteer shortages,” including a 40% vacancy rate for its recruiters. Risk and reward Some of the Peace Corps’ recruitment challenges stem from a noble goal: keeping volunteers safe. But former officials warned that risk aversion in the agency’s medical clearance process has gone too far — and could be jeopardizing the Peace Corps’ mission. “There's a risk if we don't send people back [abroad], that they won't fund the agency,” a second former senior official told Devex. Among prospective Peace Corps volunteers who submit applications, the medical clearance process is “by far the biggest drop off of the pipeline,” said the first former official. There are multiple reasons why medical clearance has become more onerous and more of a barrier to Peace Corps service. It’s partly a paperwork issue. Medical clearance used to involve a form that applicants sent in to be evaluated. Now it’s an online process that requires extensive back and forth between applicants and the agency. In the course of that extensive exchange, Peace Corps’ medical evaluators are finding more applicants with histories of mental health treatment. Younger people are much more likely to report concerns and seek care than previous generations. There is a persistent misconception among some potential Peace Corps applicants that a history of mental health treatment is disqualifying. “That is categorically untrue,” said the first former official. But it does contribute to a process with more steps, more questions, and a greater time burden on applicants. Three former senior officials who spoke to Devex for this article said the medical clearance process is a fixable problem, though it may require working with the U.S. Congress, which has also put pressure on the Peace Corps to ensure volunteer safety. In response to the deaths of volunteers Kate Puzey and Nick Castle, lawmakers have imposed new safety policies and required Peace Corps overseas posts to maintain their own medical facilities. “If we can't provide a standard of medical care that's similar to what they get in the United States, then the agency has a real hesitation to send people overseas. And I think that's a mistake,” said the second former senior official. All of the former officials who spoke to Devex for this article said that the Peace Corps’ risk management dilemma is a reflection of changing societal norms writ large. There is a greater emphasis on protecting young people today than when the Peace Corps was founded in 1961, they said, and that poses a challenge to an agency that is fundamentally about sending volunteers out into the world to have difficult, transformational experiences. “We're trying to do a mission that is about working in low-resource places, and yet we're trying to make sure nothing happens to anybody. This is the inherent contradiction,” said the first former official. Now, the agency’s new leadership team, brought in by Trump with a mandate to more than double the number of volunteers around the world, will have to answer a simple question: Is the Peace Corps’ mission worth the risk?