A Baltimore-based educational program is suing AmeriCorps and the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, for rescinding its grants to the organization.
The suit, filed in Maryland District Court by Elev8 Baltimore and a group of organizations from around the country, challenges DOGE’s decision to terminate over $400 million in AmeriCorps funding.
According to the complaint, AmeriCorps pledged $145,000 a year for five years to Elev8 under its Volunteer Generation Fund in 2023. AmeriCorps notified Elev8 in April that the organization’s VGF award was terminated.
Elev8 says that it has already used the funding to build its internal staff and amass 60 local volunteers who provided tutoring and after-school programs to more than 800 students a week at 20 Baltimore City schools and programs.
“As a community of concerned citizens in Baltimore, we have to band together to ensure that young people are not harmed by these political moves that they are caught in the middle of,” Elev8 Executive Director Alexandria Warrick Adams told The Baltimore Sun on Wednesday.
Following the notification of its grant rescission, Elev8 said it was forced to cut its internal team in half, and reduce its programming by 30%.
The cuts came after Elev8 pledged to pick up the slack created when the Trump administrationslashed $48 million in coronavirus pandemic-era funding from Baltimore City Public Schools. On Tuesday, a federal judge blocked the government’s COVID-related funding cuts for education.
Adams said the organization is already on the hunt for new sources of funding, looking for help from private philanthropists to corporate grantmakers.
Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, alongside 23 other states’ attorneys general, has also sued the Trump administration over DOGE’s AmeriCorps grant terminations.