- United States
- Mo.
- Letter
This is totally idiotic. The damage this will do to Missouri and our country is staggering. It is not your job to decide what people think or learn. The fact that you’re okay with this is mind-blowing.
Missouri schools are already suffering because of budget cuts forced by our Republican supermajority. You want people off social programs, but you keep stripping away their only path out—education. It’s cruel, and frankly, I can’t believe your party continues to support such blatant meanness. Please stand up.
Trump’s latest attack on education is jaw-dropping. The entire 12-person Fulbright Scholarship Board resigned in protest over the MAGA administration’s illegal political interference. This isn’t some fringe issue—this is a direct assault on one of the most prestigious academic exchange programs in the world.
The board said it plainly: the administration’s actions are unlawful, undermine national interests, and destroy the mission of the Fulbright program that Congress established nearly 80 years ago. Fulbright programs send American scholars abroad and bring the best foreign scholars here. They build global relationships and support critical research in fields like biology, engineering, medicine, agriculture, and the arts. Trump’s team killed 200 U.S. scholarships and is now reviewing over 1,200 foreign ones. Why? Because they don’t like the research topics. Because they want to control ideas.
This is part of Trump’s ongoing war on education, on science, on open inquiry, and on international collaboration. The State Department’s public diplomacy office, now run by a suspected white nationalist, is actively rejecting scholars based on MAGA ideology. That’s authoritarian. That’s un-American.
And now they want to gut the budget—from $691 million to just $50 million—for the Bureau that oversees Fulbright. This isn’t fiscal responsibility—it’s sabotage. It’s a deliberate attempt to destroy the program.
The resigning board members were clear: staying would have made them complicit. They begged Congress to stop this administration from degrading and dismantling one of America’s most respected programs.
I’m asking you the same. Speak up. Do your job. Stand against this blatant, political destruction of opportunity. Missouri students deserve more. America deserves more.
