Democrats dominate the Truman Scholarship’s 17 regional review panels that make the final decision each year on who is awarded a lucrative, taxpayer-funded scholarship to attend graduate school.
In total, 60 are Democrats — roughly 75 percent of the reviewers — while 10 are Republicans, and 10 could not be categorized based on their public footprint, newly conducted research by The College Fixdetermined.
The Truman Scholarship program is currently facing serious oversight efforts from House Republicans, who want to fire its current leadership under a new bill introduced in mid-March by New York Rep. Elise Stefanik.
The bill would also require “that no more than half of each board of interviewers who select Truman winners be from the same political party, to prevent interview panels from being dominated by one political party.”
The proposed legislation was prompted in part by a decade’s worth of reporting by The College Fix about the scarcity of conservative students awarded the $30,000 scholarship. Of the 653 winners reviewed from 2015 to 2025, only 29 conservatives have been identified compared to 397 liberals.