The Daily Populous Wednesday February 12nd, 2025 evening edition
Authored by insidehighered.com and submitted by Pop_Culture_Phan_Guy

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The Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, says the department terminated $881 million in contracts Monday.

The Trump administration canceled nearly $900 million in Institute of Education Sciences contracts Monday—a massive blow to a U.S. Education Department agency that houses the National Center for Education Statistics, funds research on how to improve higher education and provides publicly accessible data on U.S. postsecondary institutions.

Researchers and higher education associations worked Tuesday to better understand the scale of the cuts, which still wasn’t clear 24 hours after news first broke. A department official said 89 IES contracts were canceled, while other organizations put the total at closer to 170.

While the Education Department said that some resources such as the College Scorecard are unaffected, department employees told NPR that the cuts essentially decimated the agency, hindering its ability to collect and process data and release congressionally mandated reports.

A diminished IES, advocates warn, means less information for policymakers, researchers, families and taxpayers about how students in K-12 and college are faring.

The NCES, one of four centers in IES, has been one of the hardest hit by the cancellations. The agency is heavily reliant on contractors to conduct surveys and collect data on financial aid, student enrollment and other information about colleges. Last year, the American Statistical Association said the 2021 contractor to full-time equivalent staff ratio at NCES was nine to one and called the center “severely understaffed.”

Beyond the immediate cuts handed down Monday, review panels that decide whether to award IES grants have been halted, higher education researchers told Inside Higher Ed.

They said they will lose their online access to restricted education data sets in June, possibly due to one of the contract cancellations. They anticipate having to go through an onerous regulatory process to set up private rooms with computers disconnected from the internet in order to review the data on physical discs that the Education Department mails to them.

“It basically literally means we are stepping back in time decades, that we are now gonna look at data on CDs, they’re gonna be mailed out across the country instead of stored securely in an online data platform,” said Taylor Odle, an assistant professor of education policy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies college access and success. “It’s gonna be a huge waste of my time and a huge waste of the department’s time to have to process all of these new applications.”

Odle said the loss of federal dollars is “an assault on the U.S.’s education data infrastructure.” He added that “at some point in their career, every education researcher in the United States has leveraged a product produced by the U.S. Department of Education or IES.”

A faculty member in a college of education in the Pacific Northwest speaking anonymously said she is also losing online access to IES data sets. She said the new process “significantly delays research,” and setting up a physical space called a “cold lab” to review this data has taken six months to a year in the past. “I have to start all over again.”

Meanwhile, her upcoming trip to Washington, D.C., to serve on a review panel for seven possible IES grants has been canceled.

“We’d been working on [the review] like crazy over the last three months—I haven’t of course been compensated yet,” she said.

“I think this is an effort to really stop evidence from driving any kind of policymaking and decision-making,” she added, saying the cuts attack “the very core of the research enterprise.”

The Education Department—which President Donald Trump has been proposing to shutter since before his re-election—has given no specifics on what contracts have been canceled or what studies, work or services those agreements were meant to provide. The department didn’t respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for a list of the canceled contracts, nor did the department provide an interview Tuesday.

The institute had an $807 million budget for fiscal year 2024, a sliver of the Education Department’s $79.1 billion budget.

In an emailed response to written questions, a department spokesperson pointed to a post on X by the Elon Musk–led Department of Government Efficiency saying the Education Department terminated $881 million in contracts Monday.

“Per the DOGE X account announcement, 89 IES contracts worth nearly $900m were canceled yesterday,” the department spokesperson wrote. He said the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the College Scorecard and College Navigator “were not impacted in any contract cancellations.” (The NAEP is a widely respected national K-12 test, and the College Scorecard and College Navigator are online data sources the public can use to find basic facts about higher education institutions, such as enrollment and graduation rates, and compare them.)

What was canceled, then? The department hasn’t said. The 26-word DOGE post on X says one contractor received $1.5 million “to ‘observe mailing and clerical operations’ at a mail center.” But it says nothing of the purpose of the remaining $879.5 million worth of other canceled contracts.

A joint statement from the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics claims that more IES contracts were canceled than were mentioned in the DOGE post: about 170, “including those that NCES holds for the collection and reporting of education statistics.”

Felice Levine, executive director of AERA, said the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study was canceled. The report is required by Congress and conducted every four years. Levine described it as the “backbone” for two other longitudinal studies.

NCES’s most important role for higher education is collecting data from colleges and universities via the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). That data, which includes demographics, financial aid and more, feeds into the College Scorecard and College Navigator. A department official said IPEDS wasn’t affected by the cuts.

Mark Schneider, a nonresident senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, led the IES from 2018 to 2024 and served as commissioner of the NCES during the George W. Bush administration.

The NCES, he said, primarily supervises contracts, and after the cuts Monday, he estimates that about half of staff at the center “have nothing to do.” He said on a podcast Tuesday that what happened Monday was “difficult to swallow” and “came out of nowhere.”

But Schneider, who has advocated for moving IES to other federal agencies if President Trump shuts down the department, sees the cuts as a chance to update the department’s data systems and surveys so they are cheaper and more efficient. Schneider said at IES, there’s “a strong bias toward the status quo,” but he thinks it’s time to “rethink the game.”

“The fundamental questions are, what is the data we need and how do we build a data system that gets us the data we need in a modern way?” he said. “I hope the leadership team grabs the opportunity to … rebuild and modernize.”

He acknowledged that neither DOGE nor the department has indicated that their goal is to modernize the systems as officials tout the cuts as budget-saving measures.

Thomas Weko, a research professor at George Washington University who was the associate commissioner for postsecondary, adult and career education at NCES from 2007 to 2012, said contractors have been fundamental to the NCES’s work. While he noted NCES has had critics, he worried about the future of the center and IES more broadly.

“IES was an important funder of higher education research, an important standard-setter for higher education research in the United States, and it was viewed globally as a center of excellence and leadership,” Weko said. “There will be less education research in the future than there is today.”

Several higher education associations also raised alarm about the cuts in statements Tuesday. The Institute for College Access and Success said that without strong research and data on institutional performance and student outcomes, “Americans will be in the dark.”

Institute for Higher Education Policy president Mamie Voight said the cuts will “cause long-term scarring on our nation’s postsecondary system.”

Voight added that the cuts, which she called “irresponsible,” will stop policymakers from using data to steward taxpayer resources efficiently.

"These actions shift our country away from evidence-based policy in favor of uninformed guesswork,” she said. “Our country and our students deserve better.”

wgreeley on February 12nd, 2025 at 09:31 UTC »

Fun fact, over 20% of the entire national debt came from Trump’s last term. He carried an avg of a 2T deficit each year, more than any other president in history.

They aren’t optimizing. They are strip mining. They know they need to drastically cut costs to justify tax breaks for their rich friends and themselves. But those cuts won’t come from corporate subsidies, tax loopholes, or other things that benefit the rich. They are LITERALLY stealing from the poor to give even more to the rich. Trump said himself he wants a return to the gilded age. That time period is literally famous for poor working conditions, rampant poverty, I’m not kidding, rich people so corrupt they were known as “robber barons.”

That is where we are headed, folks.

ZipLineCrossed on February 12nd, 2025 at 08:35 UTC »

I saw him babbling about "Unelected" people being the problem... ya know, I think he's right.

Travelerdude on February 12nd, 2025 at 08:27 UTC »

What Musk and Trump don’t feel are important is not a gauge of corruption or mismanagement. What ever happened to Congressional oversight? These bozos are walking over government regulations and behaving completely illegally.