The State Department, which administers the Fulbright Program. Eleven members of the 12-person Fulbright board have resigned over alleged Trump administration interference.
Alastair Pike/AFP via Getty Images
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Alastair Pike/AFP via Getty Images
All but one member of the 12-person board that oversees the prestigious Fulbright Program has resigned, citing political interference by the Trump administration.
Congress created the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board through the 1961 Fulbright–Hays Act of 1961 to supervise the U.S. government’s flagship program of international educational and cultural exchange. The program awards some 8,000 merit-based grants each year, enabling Fulbright scholars across fields to study, teach and conduct research in some 160 countries.
Board members, whom the sitting president appoints to three-year terms, meet quarterly to establish the policies and procedures governing the non-partisan Fulbright Program. They are also responsible for selecting the scholarship participants, as the former board members wrote in a resignation letter published to Substack on Wednesday.
“At the program’s inception, Congress clearly specified that the Fulbright Board has final approval authority of applicants, which occurs after an exhaustive and deliberate, year-long process led by non-partisan career staff at the State Department and Embassies around the world,” reads the letter, from an account called “formerly the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.”
But former board members say the Trump…