Fr. Pius Pietrzyk, '97: "Calls To Defund The LSC Are Based On Outdated Information"

The Administration has recently issued its first budget plan. In seeking to reduce discretionary domestic spending, it calls for the elimination of the Legal Services Corporation (LSC). The LSC was established in 1974 to grant federal funds to provide civil legal services to the poor. Funding LSC helps to foster the principle that access to the courts is an essential element of the rule of law, the bedrock of our Republic. So why eliminate it?

I do not believe it is because the Administration “hates the poor,” or other such overheated rhetoric. Instead, I think it has been given some out-of-date information. In 2010, I was appointed as one of the Republican members of the LSC Board of Directors. At the time, I believed the program to be a typically well-intentioned government program, but which had been co-opted by leftist ideology to serve not the poor, but a political agenda. But I was wrong, and the LSC that I was tasked to oversee was very different from the LSC that I had heard about. I believe the administration operates from the same faulty premise.