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ANALYSIS: Democrats outnumber Republicans 6-to-1 on Truman review panels
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 Fix determined.
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.
One reason for the severe imbalance in winners may be that very few of the regional review panel members are themselves Republicans.
The panelists, appointed by executive secretary and former Clinton staffer Terry Babcock-Lumish, are mostly Democrats. Babcock-Lumish also sits on every panel.
The Fix reviewed public bios, LinkedIn profiles, public comments, and federal donation records to determine the political identity of the reviewers.
The regional review panel determines who is ultimately awarded the scholarships after applicants make it through a round of reviews by the “Finalist Selection Committee.”
Almost all of the panelists were themselves Truman scholars, potentially creating a self-perpetuating cycle: Democratic students are favored for the scholarship, and then down the road, they are chosen to serve as panelists.
“Trump is a danger to Georgia – and America,” one panelist once said.
“I believe my grandfather would have hated Donald Trump,” Clifton Truman Daniel, the grandson of President Harry Truman, wrote in 2020. Daniel is a panelist for the Chicago region.
Babcock-Lumish told The Fix that panelists are “volunteers” and the foundation seeks a “range” of experiences.
Yet many of the members are former Obama or Biden staffers or worked for liberal advocacy groups.
“Our Truman interviewers are volunteers – many are Truman Scholars giving back to the program,” Babcock-Lumish told The Fix. She is a former Clinton White House staffer and consultant to the Gates Foundation.
“We select panelists who are willing to invest the significant time required to prepare and fully participate in interviews throughout the country,” she said. “We aim to assemble panels that reflect a range of graduate school and public service experiences, and have experience in the region where the candidates are interviewing.”
‘Tilted pool of reviewers is cause of concern,’ expert says
However, an expert with the American Enterprise Institute, who has conducted his own research on Truman bias, said politics clearly plays a role in the selection process.
“Obviously, given the documented concerns with the ideological composition of a nonpartisan, taxpayer-funded scholarship program, a heavily tilted pool of reviewers is cause for concern,” Rick Hess told The Fix via email.
He said “alumni preferences or biases” can “get baked in” when alumni “drive selection for a publicly-funded program.”
“This is [a] good reason to insist that the selection process be transparent, include a substantial number of judges who are not alumni, and be conducted with due attention to the program’s nonpartisan tradition,” Hess said.
He said the findings are why Stefanik’s bill “deserves careful consideration.”
The 17 regional review panels meet in Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Nashville, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco, San Juan, and Seattle, with three panels in Washington, D.C.
Among these, 10 review panels have no identifiable Republican members.
Currently only two review panels, Kansas City and Phoenix, have an equal number of Republican and Democrat members, save for Babcock-Lumish’s status as a panelist on each committee.
Stefanik cited reporting by The Fix and AEI in her legislation. Rep. Stefanik’s office did not provide a comment after initially responding to an inquiry.
The Fix’s research has also shown how the program is a leftwing talent pipeline, as it spawns Democratic and progressive careers over Republican and conservative ones by a margin of 35 to 1.
An American Enterprise Institute study from 2024 also found just six of 182 Truman Scholars between 2021 and 2023 leaned conservative.
