The United States Public Service Academy (S. 960 and H.R. 1671) is a proposed institution of higher education. The Academy would be a federally subsidized four-year college modeled on the United States military service academies devoted to public service. It was envisioned in 2006 and introduced into congress in 2007 and again in the next congress but did not pass.
The Academy was envisioned in 2006 by Chris Myers Asch and Shawn Raymond.
The Public Service Academy Act was first introduced in March 2007 by Hillary Clinton and Arlen Specter in the Senate and James Moran and Christopher Shays in the House of Representatives. In the 110th Congress, the bill had 24 Senate co-sponsors and 123 House co-sponsors.
The bill was reintroduced unsuccessfully in the 111th Congress as House Bill 2102. The Senate leads included Arlen Specter and Mark Udall.
Criticism of the Academy has focused mainly on the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of the model. Maxwell School professors David Van Slyke and Alasdair Roberts wrote that the proposed academy would be redundant to the missions of the 150 undergraduate and graduate public affairs programs already in existence, whose breadth and diversity could never be matched by a single institution. [2] [3] They contend that a nationwide tuition reimbursement program resembling ROTC would be better suited to the training of young civil servants.