Pete Buttigieg, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination in part on his experience with national service as a Navy Reserve officer who deployed to Afghanistan, on Wednesday proposed a major expansion of voluntary public service programs that aims to attract 250,000 Americans in the near term and potentially grow to one million a year by 2026.
His plan calls for expanding existing national service organizations like AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps and also adding new ones focused on combating climate change, treating mental health and addiction, and providing caregiving for elderly people. The new programs would prioritize bringing volunteers into predominantly minority communities and rural areas.
In an interview, Mr. Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind., noted that only a fraction of applicants to AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps are accepted every year for available positions. According to government data, the Peace Corps currently has about 7,300 volunteers and trainees, while AmeriCorps has about 75,000 members.
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If elected, Mr. Buttigieg’s campaign said work on getting 250,000 Americans enrolled in these expanded programs would begin on his first day in office, an expansion which would be more than triple the size of those existing programs. A spokeswoman for his campaign said doing so would cost approximately $20 billion over 10 years.
Mr. Buttigieg said he would create a position on the National Security Council to manage these programs, and that officials would be flexible in addressing challenges as they arise, creating new corps as needed for priorities like resettling refugees or expanding broadband internet access in remote parts of the country.
For men and women who perform a year of service, Mr. Buttigieg’s proposal would credit that time toward student debt relief offered under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, which assists those who work for government or nonprofit organizations.
Mr. Buttigieg said his overarching goal was for public service to become a norm in the United States, and that when someone finishes high school, they would be “expected” — but not required — to serve for at least one year in some capacity. Eventually, he said, the first question posed to any job candidate or college applicant would be, “What did you do with your time in service?”
While other Democratic candidates, like Senator Elizabeth Warren, have built their campaigns around detailed policy proposals, the service program expansion is among the first plans Mr. Buttigieg has announced.
Mr. Buttigieg cited his own time in uniform as an intelligence officer as inspiration for the proposal. Joining the Navy at age 27, following his graduation from Harvard and studies at Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar, Mr. Buttigieg said he benefited from working with service members who had dramatically different backgrounds from his own, and felt connected to them despite those differences.
“At a moment when our social fabric is being torn apart, where people increasingly only hear voices that are like their own, it’s a really important time to build social capital through giving people opportunities to work in service in ways that are also going to deliver value to the country,” Mr. Buttigieg said.
“I also think you shouldn’t have to go to war to have that experience,” he added.