DOGE swept into the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education and, following its advice, the Trump administration canceled $900 million in contracts. Bear in mind, this is the team of 20-somethings who knows a lot about software and coding. It’s unlikely that they know anything about education research.
This is the agency that I ran 30 years ago when I was Assistant Secretary of Education in the first Bush administration. At that time it was called the Office of Education Research and Improvement. I could have suggested some cuts, but certainly not $900 million!
What really bothers me is that this group of kiddies could not possibly know enough to judge the quality of the work they were canceling. Not in a day. Impossible. This was just a slash and burn operation.
ProPublica reported:
The Trump administration has terminated more than $900 million in Education Department contracts, taking away a key source of data on the quality and performance of the nation’s schools.
The cuts were made at the behest of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting crew, the Department of Government Efficiency, and were disclosed on X, the social media platform Musk owns, shortly after ProPublica posed questions to U.S. Department of Education staff about the decision to decimate the agency’s research and statistics arm, the Institute of Education Sciences.
A spokesperson for the department, Madi Biedermann, said that the standardized test known as the nation’s report card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, would not be affected. Neither would the College Scorecard, which allows people to search for and compare information about colleges, she said.
IES is one of the country’s largest funders of education research, and the slashing of contracts could mean a significant loss of public knowledge about schools. The institute maintains a massive database of education statistics and contracts with scientists and education companies to compile and make data public about schools each year, such as information about school crime and safety and high school science course completion.
Its total annual budget is about $815 million, or roughly 1% of the Education Department’s overall budget of $82 billion this fiscal year. The $900 million in contracts the department is canceling includes multiyear agreements.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament” (ANAR – 1893)
Project 2025 pulls trumps strings. Trump pulls his loyalists cabinet and other directors’ strings. Cabinet and directors cut department funding, privacy, and jobs.
They are the unfriendly foreign power. It is an act of war. They are imposing “democracy disbarment” “scholarly disarmament” “science disarmament” and in a bizarre parallel twist, they are imposing actual “military intelligence disarmament” and “federal leadership embarrassment.”
This is NOT a “sputnik” moment or a “going to the moon” moment – this is a “Nation at Risk” moment and the project 2025 puppeteers and their marionettes are declaring war on America.
Somewhere in that playbook is “create your own narrative starting with destroy the data.”
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Having studied contract law–albeit in more civilized times–I’m wondering how one side can unilaterally cancel a contract.
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Jack,
I wondered about that too.
I would love to review a list of the cancelled contracts. It’s clear there were no education experts who could have advised them. They came in with a hacksaw.
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Chris Rufo has a piece in City Journal today titled “How to Dismantle the Department of Education.”
https://www.city-journal.org/article/dismantle-department-of-education-trump-elon-musk
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Here is the blueprint, from the Rufo article:
First, the department should spin off all college student loans and grants to an independent financial entity. The federal government currently backstops $1.6 trillion in student loans and issues another $110 billion in student aid each year. This is an enormous portfolio that will require a devoted set of administrators, risk analysts, and cost-cutters. These professionals should reform the student-loan portfolio, shifting as much of it as possible back to the private market and restricting the total number of loans, which is partially responsible for administrative bloat and the student-debt crisis.
Second, the administration, in cooperation with Congress, should block-grant the Department of Education’s K-12 funding programs to the states. The department sends about $100 billion to state governments and local school districts around the country every year, often with onerous restrictions and draconian ideological conditions. The Biden administration, for example, attempted to use this federal largesse to push race and gender politics into local school districts. Rather than legitimize the department’s coercive power, the administration should simply tally up all departmental K-12 expenditures, divide by state population, and disburse the result to each state with few or no strings attached. States can continue to use this funding for meals, low-income schools, and special education, but they will have the flexibility to do so in a way that best meets their local needs.
Third, Trump must shut down the Department of Education’s centers of ideological production and terminate the employment of the bureaucrats who run them. The department maintains a sprawling network of ideological centers through its research programs, as well as a vast array of NGOs, which survive on department funding and promote left-wing identity activism. These groups have become hotbeds of progressive identity politics, promoting theories of “systemic racism” and the idea that men can turn into women. Such activities do not serve the public good and do not deserve public subsidy, especially under a conservative president who promised to put an end to critical race theory and gender ideology in the federal government.
Likewise, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, while ostensibly serving a noble purpose, has been used as a battering ram to promote left-wing ideologies. The office’s core civil rights functions can easily be folded into the Department of Justice, where the administration can provide needed oversight without the Department of Education’s left-wing ideologues and civil rights apparatchiks.
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FLERP, I worked in the Department of Education. None of what Rufo said is true.
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