EXCLUSIVE — Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), chairwoman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, threatened the taxpayer-funded status of the prestigious Truman Scholarship over its heavy anti-conservative bias.

“If the Truman Scholarship functions as a career booster solely for students of a particular political persuasion, it should no longer be worthy of congressional support, taxpayer funding, or its exalted public image,” Foxx and Reps. Robert Aderholt (R-AL) and Burgess Owens (R-UT) wrote in a letter.

The Monday letter to the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation, obtained by the Washington Examiner, also questioned how it was possible that between 2021 and 2023, only six of the 182 scholarship recipients held Republican viewpoints.

Of those six, none expressed interest in protecting against the expansion of abortion access or Second Amendment rights, the letter stated. Seventy-four of the 182 scholarship recipients expressed interest in pursuing left-wing causes.

“The Truman Foundation has disproportionately provided scholarship opportunities to students who favor liberal causes over conservative ones,” Foxx told the Washington Examiner. “It is unacceptable that a publicly funded scholarship demonstrates such blatant partisanship and favoritism. The Truman Foundation must immediately address its bias so that its candidates reflect America’s wide range of values and perspectives.”

The Truman Foundation is run as a taxpayer-funded independent agency of the federal government with the stated purpose of awarding scholarships based on academic excellence and commitment to public service. The foundation also said it “supports scholars from a wide range of perspectives, interests, and geographic areas.”

“The Truman Foundation was established by Congress and is funded by taxpayers for the purpose of awarding ‘scholarships to persons who demonstrate outstanding potential for and who plan to pursue a career in public service,’” the lawmakers wrote in the letter, addressed to the foundation’s executive secretary, Dr. Terry Babcock-Lumish. “We refuse to believe that only liberal students demonstrate ‘outstanding potential’ in public service.”

Truman Foundation President Janet Napolitano, a Democrat who has held several high-profile positions in elected office, academia, and the Obama and Biden administrations, was also carbon-copied on the letter.

“Our nation is almost evenly split between Democrats and Republicans/conservatives and liberals. Therefore, there is no reason for this taxpayer-funded scholarship program to have its thumb on the scales in favor of students with liberal viewpoints,” Aderholt, chairman of the Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies, told the Washington Examiner in a statement. “The foundation must do a better job of leveling the playing field to choose students that better represent our nation’s ideological makeup.”

For the next fiscal year, the foundation requested a $3 million appropriation from Congress, but the Education Committee members believe Congress should “assess the efficacy” of the foundation.

The letter asked for a variety of metrics regarding how the Truman Foundation decides to award scholarships, what guardrails it has to ensure it does not discriminate against right-leaning students, and what steps it will take to make sure it is recruiting more ideologically diverse applicants in the future.

“Betraying its mission to produce the next generation of American leaders, the taxpayer-funded Truman Foundation has disproportionately skewed scholarship awards towards left-leaning candidates, discriminating against students based on their political beliefs,” Owens, chairman of the Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development, told the Washington Examiner. “Our committee has launched an immediate investigation into this blatant bias and egregious misuse of taxpayer dollars.”

The letter followed a report published by the American Enterprise Institute last week detailing the political biases of the Truman and Rhodes scholarships. In total, the AEI report stated, the two scholarships are awarded to liberals at a ratio of 20 to 1.

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The two largest subjects of political interest for those who received either award were immigration rights and racial justice and diversity, equity, and inclusion. Those were followed by LGBT and climate change topics. Only two categories were decidedly on the traditionally conservative side of politics: free markets and religious freedom.

While the Truman Foundation said it could not respond in full to the Washington Examiner, Deputy Executive Secretary Tara Yglesias said it would be responding to the full committee at a later date and noted that the foundation members “disagree with several of the data points used to arrive at the ’10 to 1′ number.”