Fulbright board resigns over alleged political interference : NPR

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 administration has interfered in that process, undermining its integrity and usurping the board’s authority.

What do former board members allege? 

The resignation letter says the administration denied Fulbright awards to a “substantial number” of individuals it had selected for the 2025-2026 academic year, while also subjecting another 1,200 foreign Fulbright recipients to “an unauthorized review process and could reject more.”

Awards were overridden in subject areas spanning architecture, biology, engineering, agriculture, animal sciences, medical sciences, music and history, it says, accusing the administration of “injecting politics and ideological mandates into the Fulbright program.”

“We believe these actions not only contradict the statute but are antithetical to the Fulbright mission and the values, including free speech and academic freedom, that Congress specified in the statute,” they said.

The letter says the board raised the legal issues and its strong objections with senior administration officials multiple times, including in writing, but that the officials “have refused to acknowledge or respond.”

In a statement shared with NPR, the State Department — which sponsors the program — described the board members as “partisan political appointees” of former President Joe Biden and said their claim that the 1961 Act “affords exclusive and final say” over Fulbright applications to the board is false.

“It’s ridiculous to believe that these members would continue to have final say over the application process, especially when it comes to determining academic suitability and alignment with President Trump’s Executive Orders,” it said in a statement, calling their resignations “a political stunt attempting to undermine President Trump.”

However, the State Department’s own policy brief cites the act as giving the board “final responsibility for the choice of all participants in educational exchange programs.”

The former members said they voted to resign on Wednesday, effective immediately, “rather than endorse unprecedented actions” that they believe violate the law, compromise U.S. national interests and undermine the Fulbright program’s mission and mandates.

“Our resignation is not a decision we take lightly,” they wrote. “But to continue to serve after the Administration has consistently ignored the Board’s request that they follow the law would risk legitimizing actions we believe are unlawful and damage the integrity of this storied program and America’s credibility abroad.”

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told NPR on Thursday that “President Trump, not the Fulbright Board, was elected by the American people to ensure all foreign policy initiatives align with our national interests.”

Members defend their decisions

As of Thursday morning, there is only one active member listed on the board’s website: Carmen Estrada-Schaye, who was appointed in 2022. She told NPR over email: “I intend to keep that commitment.”

“Fulbright is a valuable asset to world peace and understanding,” Estrada-Schaye wrote. “Many eventual Nobel prize winners and world leaders were Fulbright scholars early in their careers.”

James Costos, one of the members who resigned, wrote in a LinkedIn post that he had done so “not in protest, but in defense of principle.”

He reflected on meeting Harriet Mayor Fulbright — the widow of Sen. J. William Fulbright, the driving force behind the program — at an awards ceremony in 2014.

“She said her husband created the Fulbright Program, among other things, to help prevent a third world war,” Costos wrote. “He believed that if people from around the world could come to the United States to study, to live, to learn alongside Americans, they would form human connections deeper than policy or politics.”

Costos said he stepped away from the board “to honor that legacy, because I believe in it too deeply to stand by as it is compromised.”

What happens next? 

The mass resignation leaves the board’s remaining 11 seats empty. The White House did not respond to NPR’s question about Trump’s plans for filling them.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told NPR in a statement that Congress intended the board to be a check on the executive and “ensure that students, researchers and educators are not subjected to the blatant political favoritism that this Administration is known for.”

She expressed concern about what might happen without that check.

“While I understand and respect the bipartisan Fulbright Board for resigning en masse rather than grant credibility to a politicized process, I’m painfully aware that today’s move will change the quality of Fulbright programming and the independent research that has made our country a leader in so many fields,” Shaheen said.

Applications for the 2026-2027 Fulbright Program opened in April, with a deadline of early October.