The Fulbright Program: Chock Full of Bright Ideas | Hacker News Reader

The Fulbright Program: Chock Full of Bright Ideas

bastian.rieck.me

Met my current best friend 15 years ago at Georgia Tech. He was a Fulbright scholar from Turkey studying architecture. Really glad this program existed!

My uncle went from a village in the middle of nowhere to a Stanford PhD in Physics thanks to this program. Went on to become a pretty important physicist. This is real and valuable contribution, not just short-sightedly for US, but for all of us. A shame if it is discontinued.

Beautiful blogpost and I wholly agree with the message of not scrapping everything going on today because you can’t see immediate growth from it.

It’s like if the USA was a house, Donald Trump and his goons are cancelling all the utilities without realising (1) that in a month the water will be shut off and the entire house will start smelling like shit.

1. or probably without caring, it’s easy to misattribute malice for stupidity when the actions being taken are THIS malicious but that’s what’s going on. I don’t necessarily think Donald Trump is this stupid but I think he is just very very malicious. Though at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter whether he is stupid or malicious or both, the consequences of what he is doing won’t change depending on intentions.

The level of trashing federal government programs that’s taken place in the last 7 months is just mind-boggling. I don’t think I’ll live long enough to see the damage undone.

There’s a dozen people with their fingers in the policy pie. End of the day, the people calling the shots don’t believe in America as it was, and are creating a new era with their application of federal power.

The end of the post-WW2 American era has arrived, and looking at the state of the opposition, it’s not coming back. The courts have essentially executed a constitutional change which will have far reaching impact.

The smart move now is to figure out what that means to you and your family. Trump is a narcissist with obvious limitations. The true threat is a more organized sociopath, backed by the rulings of a young, craven federal judiciary, and what monstrous stuff is truly possible.

Everything Nixon did is legal now, and no doubt worse stuff is happening.

Surprised that Fulbright scholarships are still a thing, given DOGE. Cultural exchange programs seems like something the current US administration would get a severe rash from.

Exactly. If you like it, don't draw attention to it.

  “The Fulbright Program's mission is to bring a little 
  more knowledge, a little more reason, and a little more
  compassion into world affairs and thereby increase the
  chance that nations will learn at last to live in peace 
  and friendship.” — Senator J. William Fulbright

Yes, that seems out of step with the MAGA era.

To me it seems out of step with US foreign policy.

Like all US institutions that support higher education and diversity, the Trump administration is attacking it:

Fulbright Board Resigns After Accusing Trump Aides of Political Interference: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/11/us/politics/fulbright-boa...

Education Dept. Cancels Fulbright-Hays Applications, at Least for Now: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/global/study-abroad/2025...

Association of International Educators warns students won’t want to come to the US https://abcnews.go.com/US/video/association-international-ed...

It was really close. Check out https://fulbright.org/status

Trump's draft 2026 budget in May would have cut its funding by 93%. In June, the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, the whole board, resigned in protest, because the Trump administration was meddling and trying to remove funding for certain foreigners and to add new inspections for scholars who were wrong in some unspecified way. Fortunately, the funding got back into the draft bill in mid-July.

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