Congress scrambled this week to head off a looming crisis in AmeriCorps, America's full-time national service program. By unanimous consent in the House and the Senate, legislation was approved that lessens the deep cuts in AmeriCorps by resolving a dispute over the accounting procedures that govern the use of its education Trust Fund. However, friends of national service should not be under any illusions that this alone will solve the problem. The president praised the passage of the legislation as an "essential first step toward maximizing enrollment this year," but declined to say what other steps he was willing to support.

Even with this legislative fix to the Trust Fund, the number of AmeriCorps members is on track to decline dramatically in the coming year, dropping from 67,000 currently enrolled members in 2002-2003 to 28,000 in 2003-2004 -- a 58 percent decrease. This sharp decline will not only deny tens of thousands of Americans an opportunity to go to college on an education scholarship earned through a year of national service, it will also prove devastating for many of America's most successful civic groups like Teach for America, City Year, and Habitat for Humanity.

Fortunately, political support is growing for additional action to head off this dramatic shortfall. A bipartisan group of 48 senators, led by Sens. Evan Bayh (D-IN) and John McCain (R-AZ), has lined up behind a supplemental bill that would provide an additional $200 million in funds to assure that AmeriCorps can support at least 50,000 members this year. Getting this supplemental bill through Congress will require strong presidential leadership in the coming weeks. Yet, in the year and half since the president first promised to increase AmeriCorps by 50 percent, that is exactly what he has failed to provide.

The last time the president updated the public on the state of AmeriCorps -- back on December 10, 2002 -- he declared that the program was "expanding mightily." Unfortunately for the young Americans he called upon to serve, the president had it exactly backwards. On December 10, the AmeriCorps program was actually more than a month into a "recruiting freeze" caused by the president's failure to request any money for the Trust Fund in his FY 2002 budget and by the depletion of the remaining funds over the first half of 2002 as leaders at the Corporation for National and Community Service rushed to meet the president's recruiting targets a year ahead of schedule. During the last seven months, the president has remained silent as numerous opportunities to fix these problems passed him by.

• In January and February, as the appropriations bill that provided funding for AmeriCorps moved through Congress, the president failed to propose sufficient funding to correct the shortfall in the Trust Fund. As a result, Congress made up for the shortfall by shifting funds from AmeriCorps' operating budget to the Trust Fund, resulting in a 30 percent cut in the AmeriCorps grants program.
• Beginning in March, this budget cut was compounded by a dispute between the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the General Accounting Office (GAO) over the accounting procedures used for the AmeriCorps Trust Fund. Under the OMB rules, existing funds in the Trust could support 28,000 new AmeriCorps members in 2003, while under the GAO rules, only 13,000 new members could be supported. Lacking presidential backing for a legislative fix that would uphold the OMB ruling, the Corporation was forced to accept the GAO numbers, leading to a sharp decline in the funds available for the upcoming class of AmeriCorps members.
• In April, the president did not include additional funds for AmeriCorps in his Spring supplemental request, and Congress passed a supplemental without these funds. Despite a huge shortfall in the Trust Fund and a 30 percent cut in the operating budget, administration officials insisted that no additional funds were needed to prevent a decline in AmeriCorps members in 2003.

Now the president has one last chance to save AmeriCorps from these ruinous cuts and redeem his own promise to expand the opportunities to serve. While administration officials point to budget requests and recruiting targets to demonstrate the president's commitment to national service, the American people are looking for results. A decline in AmeriCorps members this year will speak for itself.

Marc Magee is director of the Center for Civic Enterprise at the Progressive Policy Institute.