GOP Rep. Declares War On Peace Corps, Demands End To Program In China

After a recent trip to China, Republican Rep. Mike Coffman (CO) came across what he saw as a shocking number of government-funded Americans wasting taxpayer money on a Chinese demographic already flush with funds. These Americans, Coffman said, are “symbolic of the arrogance and carelessness in how our tax dollars have been handled by Congress and the Obama administration.” These Americans, incidentally, are Peace Corps volunteers.

Aghast to find Peace Corps volunteers teaching English in Chinese universities, Coffman is now demanding that the government suspend the Peace Corps program in China as it is “an insult to every American taxpayer and to so many of our manufacturing workers who have lost their jobs to China”:

“Having the Peace Corps in China, where we have to borrow money from the Chinese to fund it, is an insult to every American taxpayer and to so many of our manufacturing workers who have lost their jobs to China,” he said.

Coffman is gathering congressional signatures to send a letter to President Barack Obama demanding that the government immediately suspend the Peace Corps program in China.

In the letter, Coffman said the U.S. government is short of money to fund its higher-education system while funding a Peace Corps program in China that defrays that country’s higher-education costs.

There are about 140 volunteers in the Peace Corps program to China. The program costs $2.9 million or 0.5 percent of the Peace Corps total budget in 2011. What’s more, the Chinese government pays for the housing of all the American volunteers. However, Coffman insisted that taxpayers are subsidizing China’s state-run education system and declared that if Obama fails to suspend the program, he will offer an amendment “that will eliminate funding for it.”