A tool that helps educators sift through dense curriculum research. Surveys on school crime. Long-term studies examining outcomes for high schoolers after graduation.
All those services and more came to a sudden standstill this week as the Trump administration abruptly revoked nearly $900 million in contracts funded by the U.S. Department of Education.
Billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team late Monday touted the termination of 89 education department contracts. Though at least a handful touch on diversity, equity, and inclusion, most seem to stem from the agency’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences.
IES is best known for overseeing the National Assessment of Educational Progress as well as statistics-gathering and dissemination through the National Center for Education Statistics. A major funder of education research, it basked for years in strong bipartisan backing.
IES’ placement at the bullseye of the Trump administration’s bid to bash the education bureaucracy is a signal that a different breed of Republican is in charge during this second term, said Frederick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.
During Trump’s first term, his education secretary, Betsy DeVos, espoused GOP K-12 pillars like expanding school choice and shrinking the federal role in education. But she “stepped gingerly” around established institutions, Hess said.
By contrast, this “new flavor of MAGA populism,” epitomized by Musk, is “far less interested in trying to make subtle distinctions between constructive federal activity [such as] data collection versus the problematic.”
Research projects on the chopping block
Education researchers and those who count on federal education data on Tuesday were taking stock of the impact of the cascade of contract cancellations.
While the Trump administration has not released a detailed list of eliminated contracts, sources familiar with the programs say they include the What Works Clearinghouse, which gathers and summarizes education research; the , which collects demographic and outcomes data from colleges and universities; and the review panels that assess applications for funding from the National Center for Education Research and National Center for Special Education Research, two other sub-agencies within IES.
Another function affected by the cancellations is the Digest of Education Statistics, a periodic compilation of statistics on the nation’s education system, from prekindergarten through graduate school.
An Education Department spokesperson on Tuesday pointed to that touted the cancellation of 89 contracts worth $881 million.
Some of the functions for which IES is most recognized—including NAEP; the College Scorecard, which displays colleges’ outcomes and cost data; and the College Navigator, another tool for exploring colleges—were not part of the contract cancellations, the spokesperson said.
‘All this breakage is essential’
Many on Tuesday blasted the swift and seemingly indiscriminate cancellations and questioned the wisdom of terminating hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts for work still in progress. Others argued that a review of federal research priorities has long been overdue.
“It would be one thing to say, all right, we’re going to undertake a careful process of examination to determine which of these contracts are really paying off,” said Adam Gamoran, the president of the William T. Grant Foundation and former chair of IES’s advisory board. “But to take a sledgehammer to the whole set of contracts is capricious and surely throwing out many, many important studies that are giving us crucial information that we need to understand the state and progress in the American education system.”
The longitudinal studies IES funds provide important context around changes in students’ mental health, absenteeism, and competitiveness in math and science, argued Gamoran, whom former President Joe Biden tapped as director of IES last fall. The Senate did not confirm Gamoran before the end of the Biden administration; Matthew Soldner continues to serve as the agency’s acting director.
But Mark Schneider, who started directing IES during the first Trump administration before leaving the agency last year, viewed the contract cancellations as much-needed housekeeping. Schneider said he spent much of his tenure at the agency pushing to overhaul grant and contract procedures and major longitudinal studies like IPEDS. While some of the questions asked in IES’ main postsecondary education data collection are congressionally mandated, he said, others have been held over from individual and outdated research projects.
“Don’t tell me that we’re going to do surveys because we’ve been doing surveys for 60 years,” he said. “Tell me what the indicators are that we get from surveys and tell me, are our longitudinal surveys the best way to get it?”
Ending older longitudinal studies may clear the way to develop faster and more precise data and research, Schneider said.
“All this breakage is in some ways essential,” said Schneider, now a senior scholar at AEI, “The question is, what happens next? You know, ‘move fast and break things’ is fine, except then what do you build?”
Contract cancellations come amid other Education Department downsizing
The move to cancel hundreds of millions of dollars in education research and evaluation contracts follows recent action by the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s DOGE team to start downsizing the Education Department, in line with a campaign pledge Trump repeatedly made to close the agency.
Dozens of employees have been placed on administrative leave in recent weeks as the administration has tried to rid federal agencies of their diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Interim department leadership has according to NBC News. And an executive order is reportedly in the works that will seek to kick off the dismantling of the 45-year-old agency.
Trump told reporters last week that he wants Linda McMahon, the business mogul he’s nominated to run the Education Department, “to put herself out of a job.” McMahon appears before senators on Thursday for her confirmation hearing.
But as the Trump administration shrinks the department’s portfolio by canceling these contracts, it is rolling back what conservative critics of the education department have long touted as an appropriate role for the federal government in education: statistics-gathering—a function that dates all the way back to education’s pre-Cabinet origins—and research dissemination.
Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint developed by the Heritage Foundation and a number of officials from the first Trump administration, advocated scaling back the federal role in education but maintaining the federal government’s involvement in statistics gathering—a key IES function.
And back in 1981, when President Ronald Reagan’s education secretary wrote a memo recommending that the then-new Education Department be converted to a small foundation, he envisioned federal support for education research as one of its primary roles.
Some cancellations will have an immediate impact on schools
Several of the contract eliminations would have an immediate impact on schools’ work.
The What Works Clearinghouse, designed in the early 2000s to support a shift to evidence-based practice in schools, assesses the quality and strength of research around various curricula and other instructional interventions. Its related practice guides, designed for educators, are clear introductions into topics such as mathematics interventions for struggling students and high school writing, with links to research supporting their recommendations.
It is not clear whether the suspension of the review panels that assess applications for research funding means no new research grants will be funded. And several of the largest data collections that could be threatened are themselves used by scores of researchers for studies.
“The department says we’re going to protect the College Scorecard. Well, you can’t do the college scorecard without IPEDS, right? And we’re going to protect NAEP. But you can’t do NAEP without the [Common Core of Data],” Schneider said. “It’s a lot more bound up than just these discrete things unrelated to one another. That’s the problem with moving fast and breaking things without understanding that if you break X, you’re actually breaking Y and Z.”
‘Everyone is stranded’
The nixed contracts include a deep, multi-year investigation into how to use high-quality commercial products to teach math skills to students who are more than a year behind—a notoriously difficult group to reach. The project cost over a $1 million and has been progressing for over two years, said one of researchers involved.
This school year has been a “major data collection year” but the order from IES means the work can’t be completed, said this researcher, who spoke without attribution in order to be candid about the consequences of the contract’s termination.
Districts that had been receiving the services have called the researchers, upset, he added.
“We’re working with schools in all different parts of the country on this. It’s not a blue state thing,” the researcher said. “They’re all calling us because there’s a direct withdrawal of service of something that they’re using with their students and depending on having in place for the year. The companies were working with us in good faith. Everyone is stranded.”
The terminated contracts include work that Musk’s belt-tighteners saw as tainted by DEI—a toxic concept in MAGA world and the subject of a first-day Trump executive order that sought to eliminate DEI initiatives from the federal government.
One such contract is a roughly five-year collaboration between the Illinois education department and WestEd, a research and educational services organization, investigating strategies to recruit and develop leaders for hard-to-staff schools. Although the project included a focus on principals of color, its work was applicable to all sorts of environments that struggle to attract leaders, including remote rural schools.
“There’s some really great work here that could benefit kids, communities and families,” said Jannelle Kubinec, WestEd’s chief executive officer.
Eliminating these contracts may say more about what Musk’s group can do without congressional action than any particular efficiency goals. IES represents only about 1 percent of the Education Department’s $80 billion budget. But hacking most of the department’s pricier bedrock grants—like Title I for disadvantaged students, special education, and Pell—would require approval from lawmakers, all of whom have students in their congressional districts that depend on the money.
Similarly, high-profile contracts like the Regional Educational Labs, which have come up on the chopping block repeatedly under prior administrations, are protected by congressional mandates. Those labs offer research and technical support to states and districts.
That leaves IES’s other contracts as among the few spending areas in the Education Department that can be easily cut, said Grover “Russ” Whitehurst, IES’ first director when the agency was created under President George W. Bush.
“If your goal is to end up with an organization that’s leaner and more effective than the one you’ve got now, [the contract elimination] makes no sense,” Whitehurst said. “But if your goal is to chop what you can and stay away from the things that would raise clear legal issues about your authority to do this, [the contract terminations] make sense.”
Eliminating the longitudinal studies could backfire on DOGE, said Whitehurst, now a nonresident fellow in the Center on Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute.
“Most of what Musk’s people have done is around increasing efficiency, reducing waste, spending money on things that are important rather than unimportant,” Whitehurst said. “But how do you know that if you don’t have any information on those things? It’s shortsighted to me.”
