Fmr. Rep. David Price:
Well, when the program was first set up almost 80 years ago, Senator Fulbright himself wanted to safeguard against political interference in the program in the selection of scholars, interference with academic freedom on the part of any administration in the future.
So the board was written into the statute with precisely that mission. It’s an unusual mission for a board, but we were given final authority over the selection process. And we went through that, as we always do, this year. We had the awards ready to go in the middle of March.
But the Trump administration’s political appointees told us that they intended to review our work and to make their own judgments. And that was ominous, but we watched that process. We tried to communicate with them. When we got wind that they were going to be canceling a number of the awards, we objected and cited our statutory responsibility and the values underlying it.
And we got silence, no response whatsoever. So, finally, when all this became clear in the middle of May, two months later, over 200 applications had been canceled by the Trump appointees. And another 1,200 or so were under review. At that point, it was clear that the Trump administration wasn’t responsive to our questions and they were ignoring their legislative mandate.
And we didn’t think there was more we could do. Indeed, we just could not remain in position and appear to legitimize the gross distortion — for the first time in 80 years, the first gross distortion of this program, the political interjection of politics into the selection process.
