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ACORN, the advocacy organization, is apparantly rebranding.

Reports say it is changing it's name across the country, and reorganizing under new local community groups to get away from the notierity the name ACORN has, to some, engendered.

Fox News paid a visit to the ACORN office in Brooklyn, New York and found a banner with the name "New York Communities for Change" added to the front entrance. The employees inside the office said it is a whole new organization.

Others say the name swap is just a bait and switch.

"This desolving of the national structure by ACORN is just a PR head fake. It's a sham," Matthew Vadum of the Capital Research Center in Washington, D.C. told Fox News. He says the new organizations will just continue ACORN's work with the same agenda, in the same offices, just under different names.

He says it's all about ACORN trying to stay alive after Congress voted to cut off funding last year, a move a Judge later ruled was unconstitutional.

"ACORN wants to keep the money flowing," says Vadum. "In order to do that, they figure they need to change the name and change their image and they're doing that by re-incorporating their state chapters under new names."

A spokesman for ACORN did not return our request for comment, but was quoted as blaming ACORN's critics for the change. Scott Levenson, the ACORN spokesman, was quoted in news reports as citing "a series of vicious right wing attacks over the past year and a half, and this has made it harder for ACORN to raise funds and organize and serve its members."

The efforts to stop taxpayer money from going to ACORN accelerated after the debut of the explosive undercover videos made by conservative activist filmmakers James O'Keefe and his partner, Hannah Ghiles, last September. They pretended to be a pimp and a prostitute, and on the tapes some ACORN employees were shown apparantly advising them on how to skirt the law. ACORN later fired some of the employees.

ACORN has harshly denounced O'Keefe, but perhaps in an indication of its financial straits, has also used him to try to raise money. Earlier this month, a fundraising solicitation from ACORN repeatedly cited O'Keefe as a reason for people to donate.

"Can you chip in $52 to help us keep the pressure on O'Keefe and his corporate paymasters?" the fundraising letter asked.

"The smear campaign initiated by O'Keefe has allowed attacks not just on ACORN's good works, but on all aspects of the change agenda," it claimed. "All corporate forces have to do now is imply that a person, organization, or policy has some past association with ACORN and it becomes a lightning rod for more smears from the corporate-funded attack media...With your help we can expose the corporate-backed anti-Main Street agenda behind O'Keefe's sleaze, and step up the fight for a progressive pro-Main Street agenda."

There is no word if any of the solicated funds would remain with ACORN, or end up with any new organizations.