https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-02-05/trump-killed-the-american-climate-corps
Just days before President Trump’s inauguration, a small banner appeared at the top of the American Climate Corps’ website: “This is historical material ‘frozen in time.’”
In a flurry of first-day executive actions, Trump ordered all activities, programs and operations associated with the corps to be “terminated immediately.” On Monday, the site disappeared entirely.
It marked the quick death of a program the Biden administration struggled for years to get off the ground.
Like many promises in former President Biden’s climate agenda, the corps failed to gain traction in Congress, leaving the administration with little money to fund it. What started as a multibillion-dollar vision to supercharge climate action across America, ended up primarily as a job board on a federal site, advertising climate service jobs around the country.
Organizations that partnered with the corps to employ young people in climate jobs and a former White House senior official said that while the ACC did help catalyze national climate action, most of the independent programs branded under the ACC will continue largely unaffected.
To those deeply involved in the corps’ operations, Trump’s election dashed a hope that a bare-bones ACC would grow into something bigger and more tangible.
“The writing was on the wall,” said Dan Knapp, executive director of the Conservation Corps of Long Beach, which joined the ACC as a partner organization in 2024 and has more than 100 corps members.
The vision of a nationwide service corps to address climate change began as a 2020 campaign promise by then-candidate Biden. Once he was in office, the ambitious and expensive Build Back Better bill proposed allocating more than $5 billion to fund climate corps positions in the National Park Service, Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and Bureau of Indian Affairs.
But the Inflation Reduction Act that ultimately passed in 2022 included many cuts in concession to Republican demands and made no mention of a climate corps.
A year after Biden signed the IRA into law, he announced he was creating the corps anyway. After another seven months, on Earth Day 2024, the president announced the launch of the corps’ website and the opening of climate service positions across the country. While Biden’s original goal was to recruit 300,000 corps members for the ACC, by the time the website went live, the target had been dropped to 20,000.
