FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—A House committee will likely pass a bill to reform a taxpayer-funded scholarship that critics call a “talent pipeline for the Democratic Party and liberal activist organizations,” a committee spokesperson told The Daily Signal.
The spokesperson for the House Committee on Education and the Workforce predicted that the bill will pass the committee “rather easily.” It is scheduled for markup on Tuesday.
The upcoming vote comes after congressional Republicans and scholars spent years denouncing the Truman Scholarship, which Congress created in honor of former President Harry Truman in 1975.
“My legislation would finally reform the Truman Scholarship Foundation to promote an ideologically diverse class of recipients and ensure that only law-abiding students receive these scholarships,” Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., said about her Truman Scholarship Clean House Act in a statement to The Daily Signal.
Stefanik’s bill would repeal and replace the scholarship’s current board of directors and executive secretary, allowing President Donald Trump to appoint new directors who will then have to be confirmed by the Senate.
The bill would also require candidates to receive the approval of a supermajority of the board in order “to prevent highly biased individuals from serving as an interviewer.”
The bill’s history traces back to testimony from Jennifer Kabbany at The College Fix last December.
Kabbany told the committee that only 29 out of the 653 scholarship recipients from 2015 to 2025 had been conservative.
“The Truman Scholarship Foundation seeks regional diversity in its selections and tries to award its scholarships to students from every state,” Kabbany wrote in her testimony.
She noted that The College Fix’s research showed winners chosen from Republican-leaning states end up working for “progressive causes or Democratic politicians.”
“The decade-long data reveals a taxpayer-funded program that, in practice, functions as a talent pipeline for the Democratic Party and liberal activist organizations,” Kabbany added during her testimony.
In the same hearing, NAACP Legal Defense Fund Senior Policy Counsel Ashley Harrington accused the Trump administration and its allies in Congress of engaging in “viewpoint discrimination” by condemning the scholarship’s bias.
“The recent calls for interference in the selection process for Truman Scholars represent just another attempt by the administration to influence individuals from taking on viewpoints that it disfavors,” Harrington wrote in her testimony. “This amounts to classic viewpoint discrimination.”
President Harry Truman in Florida, December of 1947. (Getty Images)
Stefanik condemned the scholarship’s bias as “unfortunate and inappropriate” and claimed that the Truman Scholarship Foundation “continues to award scholarships to radical left-wing students and even criminals.”
“Multiple data analyses have revealed the systemic underrepresentation of conservative scholarship recipients,” the congresswoman continued.
The Truman Scholarship did not immediately respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.
