The Trump administration canceled $881 million in contracts for education research, targeting programs its Department of Government Efficiency flagged as examples of wasteful spending.
In announcing the cuts, DOGE noted that one contractor was paid $1.5 million to “observe mailing and clerical operations at a mail center.”
The Education Department said the 89 canceled contracts at the Institute of Education Sciences included $4.6 million to coordinate Zoom and in-person meetings and $3 million for “a report that showed prior reports were not utilized by schools.”
The department said in a statement that IES was started in 2002 to “fund development and rigorous testing of new approaches for improving education outcomes for all students. … $14 billion and countless contracts later, our students are no better off” in math scores.
“The Department of Education is committed to investing taxpayer dollars in student outcomes,” it said. “We want to ensure that every dollar being spent is directed toward improving education for kids – not conferences and reports on reports.”
The cuts represent a small slice of the federal agency’s $79.1 billion budget. The department also said they do not affect the congressionally mandated National Assessment of Educational Progress — known as the nation’s report card — or the College Scorecard, which provides data for families to compare and select colleges.
In the latest results published last month, the NAEP found that 31% of fourth graders and 30% of eighth graders nationally were reading proficiently in 2024. That was down 2% and 1% from the last exam in 2022, respectively, and a 10-point drop from 2019.
Several nonprofit academic research companies claimed the cuts went much deeper and could prevent the department’s National Center for Education Statistics from gathering essential information for families and policymakers.
A joint statement from the American Educational Research Association and the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics put the number of canceled IES contracts closer to 170 and said they included “those that NCES holds for the collection and reporting of education statistics.”
“It seems that many halted contracts were designed to evaluate outcomes of government programs, which would seem to be the very information that should help guide decisions about where to cut government waste,” said Heather Peske, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality.
Following the DOGE announcement, Ms. Peske said her research team “rushed to download irreplaceable data” from the NCES website due to a lack of clarity about “which contracts are being cut.”
The Alliance for Learning Innovation, Data Quality Campaign, Digital Promise, InnovateEDU, Knowledge Alliance and Results for America said in a joint statement that the cuts “threaten to compromise the ability of states and school districts to improve education outcomes for students and remain globally competitive.”
“As scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress are down and chronic absenteeism is up, state and local leaders across all 50 states need nonpartisan research to guide the way forward,” it said.
Jeanne Allen, who served as a senior official in the Reagan Education Department and now leads the right-leaning Center for Education Reform, said the burden should be on the contractors to prove that their research aided student success. She said those who believed as much could still “apply competitively” for grants to resume their funding.
“It’s unlikely that cuts to the Education Department’s research will have any impact on education progress,” Ms. Allen told The Times. “Education research and data gathering contracts are typically not essential services that make schools any better.”
Rita McGrath, a professor at Columbia University Business School, said she would give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt on the eliminated contracts.
“In many bureaucracies like the Education Department, activities creep along incrementally, often following a logic of their own,” Ms. McGrath said. “What the DOGE efforts will force, however ham-handed and indiscriminate they are, is a bottom-up revisiting of the principles for funding such activities. That may well prove to be useful in the long run, even if it disrupts a lot of well-intentioned work in the short run.”
• Sean Salai can be reached at ssalai@washingtontimes.com.