Some budget cutting is stupid

The Fulbright Program has served this country and the world well for 68 years. It annually arranges for thousands of educators, students and researchers to be exchanged between the United States and at least 155 other countries. It has been lauded as “the flagship international educational exchange program” of American cultural diplomacy. There have been more than 325,000 Fulbright Scholars. Their accomplishments are fantastic: 53 Nobel Prize winners, 28 MacArthur Foundation fellows, 80 winners of the Pulitzer Prize, 29 who have served as the head of state or government and at least one, lunar geologist Harrison Schmitt (Norway, 1957), who walked on the moon. Plus the hundreds of thousands who returned to their countries with greater understanding and respect for others and a desire to get along. So why does the State Department want to cut the program's funding?

This is one of the few programs that other countries help fund. Fifty countries have established Fulbright commissions of their own to fund their share, or more than their share, of the mutual exchange. The program is not intended to be a tool of foreign policy. It was and still is “designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.”