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Republicans from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce have threatened to pull taxpayer funding from the prestigious Truman Scholarship, arguing that the merit award program for “persons who demonstrate outstanding potential for a career in public service” has disproportionately favored liberal candidates.
Committee chair Virginia Foxx, along with subcommittee chairs Burgess Owens and Robert Aderholt, expressed their concerns in a letter to the Truman Scholarship Foundation Tuesday, citing a report from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute which noted that of the 182 Truman winners between 2021 and 2023, just six recipients espoused interest in a traditionally “conservative-leaning” cause. By contrast, AEI determined that 74 winners supported progressive causes.
(The AEI report found a similar bias when analyzing honorees of the UK-based Rhodes Scholarship.)
“We refuse to believe that only liberal students demonstrate ‘outstanding potential’ in public service,” the letter reads. “As a publicly funded award charged with preparing the civic leaders of tomorrow, the Truman Scholarship should, at a bare minimum, be reflective of the country’s breadth of values, viewpoints, and interest.”
The report noted that while numerous scholarship winners cited an interest in topics such as immigrant rights or diversity and racial justice, not a single winner professed interest in protecting the rights of the unborn or defending the Second Amendment.
Tara Yglesias, the foundation’s deputy executive secretary, who is responsible for the scholar selection process, faulted the AEI analysis as having “broadly characterized issues as conservative or progressive with very little justification.”
“We do not ask for a scholar’s political stance and often do not know where their beliefs lie,” Yglesias said. “We were concerned it divided our scholars into competing factions when most scholars would prefer to remain focused on issues of interest to them.”
The AEI did not respond to questions about its analysis.
The committee’s letter concluded by asking the foundation to clarify its efforts to ensure a wide range of perspectives and to say what steps it will take to recruit a more ideologically diverse candidate pool in the future.
