Responding to lawsuits filed after the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, led by billionaire Elon Musk, canceled more than 100 key research contracts in February, the department in June said it planned to reinstate 20 of the contracts. And a lawsuit will give a short reprieve to 10 federally funded . The department is also asking the public for guidance on how it can modernize the Institute of Education Sciences, its research, evaluation and statistics arm. 

“They’re not saying in any explicit way, but you see this ‘build-back,’” said a longtime assessment professional familiar with IES, who asked not to be named to preserve professional relationships.

The department likely realized that, despite the DOGE cuts, IES still had a lot of congressionally mandated work to do. “I think there were some ‘Oh shit!’ moments, but nobody would say that, because they’re not going to criticize DOGE or the president.”

, executive director of the American Educational Research Association, called the developments “cautiously encouraging,” noting also that NCES plans updates to several surveys and administrative data collections. And it’s releasing existing surveys such as , which analyze data each year from all U.S. colleges and universities that receive federal financial aid.

“On a scale of 1 to 10 — where IES was at 10 prior to the DOGE cuts and 1 a month ago — we would place it at 3 or 4 today,” said Chavous. 

But she added that “severe staff shortages” at the department “continue to threaten data quality and research progress. We remain deeply concerned about the long-term impacts of these cuts on researchers and others who rely on federally collected and supported data.”

Despite the Trump administration’s promise to shutter the Education Department, it seems to be looking for ways to keep its research activities moving forward. Last month, the administration published a , seeking public input on how it can modernize IES. That effort will stop temporarily during the current government shutdown.

The department has also brought in , a longtime Washington, D.C., education researcher, to take on the task of reforming IES. Northern, on leave from the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, is expected to remain at the department until December. While her remit lasts just six months, it is giving researchers hope that having one of their own advising McMahon will yield positive results.

“I am more hopeful than I was three months ago that there will be some reinvention, rather than a death, of federal education research,” said a scholar at a top nonprofit research organization with several long-term federal contracts. “To me, it seems just absurd that the federal government would say, ‘We’re getting out of the realm of doing education research,’ because education is so fundamental to the future of the country.”

In interviews, several researchers and policy experts said they’re similarly optimistic, but most requested to remain anonymous, fearing that speaking out could jeopardize future funding and relationships with administration officials.

Of Northern, one researcher said she’s “very much someone who believes in empirical evidence. So I could not think of a better person to be advising the Trump administration on the future of IES.”

Mike Petrilli, Fordham’s president and , said he was pleased that McMahon would turn to her for guidance. “I always felt it was a good sign that they wanted somebody like Amber,” he said, viewing it as “an indication that they did want to rebuild” IES, not get rid of it.

Petrilli, who has on occasion of Trump since his first election in 2016, said he’s optimistic that “the people, the political appointees now at the Department of Education, understand the importance of research and evaluation and statistics.” But Musk’s DOGE operation, he said, was “able to do great damage, terrible damage, before anybody had a chance to stop them.”

Another person who works closely with researchers in the field, who asked not to be identified, said they have been assured by top administration officials that “There’s a lot that’s going to come back online — it’s just going to come back online in different ways that some of the field will be ready for, and other parts of the field will not be ready for.” The source said the department is looking into performance- and outcomes-based contracting, a more flexible system that lets agencies more clearly. 

Administration officials, meanwhile, have acknowledged “the chaos of the first six months,” which they don’t want to repeat, the source said. They’re in the process of shifting to “a different sort of phase where we want to see results for this money that we’re spending.”

In a statement, U.S. Education Department spokesperson Madi Biedermann said the Trump Administration “is committed to supporting a national education research entity that delivers usable, high-quality data and resources for educators, researchers, and other stakeholders. This has been clear in the Secretary’s repeated commitments to protect NAEP. NCES and IES were in desperate need of reform.”

McMahon in May told congressional lawmakers she had rehired “” of the approximately 2,000 department employees who were laid off last winter, though a department spokesperson disputed this.

Several people said they were surprised and heartened that IES last month began for eight — and possibly more — high-level assessment jobs at the National Center for Education Statistics, for work on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

But several experts said there’s a lot of work to do if the administration genuinely wants to rebuild its research infrastructure, given DOGE’s deep cuts last winter, when the ad hoc agency trimmed the NCES staff from about 100 employees to three. 

“It’s hard to be too optimistic, given the limited resources that NCES has in particular,” said , a professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville who studies state higher education finance and the financial viability of higher education. 

Kelchen said the administration’s own priorities could make McMahon’s work more challenging, noting that an Aug. 7 executive order by President Trump forces NCES to undertake a massive that will collect data on admissions practices going back five years by race, sex and test scores, among other indicators. 

The order alleges that race-based admissions practices “are not only unfair, but also threaten our national security and well-being.”&�Բ�����;

The survey, said Kelchen, is “a massive data collection effort — and it’s hard to see how it ends up being successful, especially retroactively.”

Poor NAEP results

Several people said recent poor student results on NAEP have likely catalyzed much of the strong support for IES.

“They knew the NAEP results were going to be bad, and they got these NAEP job descriptions up quickly,” said one observer.

Several others agreed, but just as many said the recent poor results bring a new urgency to reshaping NAEP so that its next generation of tests are both high-quality and relevant to educators.

“NAEP is falling further and further behind in terms of the gold standard, which it hasn’t been for some time,” said a former IES official. “But what is the plan? What’s the vision? NAEP just confirms bad news all the time. So what are we going to have in terms of policies to correct it?” 

Another person familiar with NAEP predicted that even with NCES’s smaller staff, next year’s tests “will likely go off O.K.,” but that many reporting functions, such as score reports broken out by states, have been cut to shrink costs, making the results less useful. “It’s one thing to collect the data — it’s another thing to report it in a way that people can use.”&�Բ�����;

This person said NAEP is well-known for robust reporting platforms such as its , but IES has already said it will end future district-level reporting for 8th-grade history and science tests, among others. “If we’re short-handed there, then people will say, ‘What’s the value of NAEP?’”

Looking ahead, this person worries that cuts to functions like the , an extensive database on public K-12 education, and other efforts could compromise the actual tests after 2026. “If we don’t have good sampling and weighting, then NAEP is just a test. It’s not the Nation’s Report Card, because we need all those data to be able to make it a truly national picture.”

The ‘education improvement industrial complex’

A prime example of the changes taking place is the expected reinstatement of the 10 regional education labs, or RELs, which were funded to the tune of $336 million, but were closed in February after the department alleged, without offering much evidence, that a review “wasteful and ideologically driven spending.” It noted, for instance, that a lab based in Ohio had been advising schools there to undertake “equity audits.”

But educators nationwide have rallied to the labs’ defense, noting that in 2019 the REL Southeast, based at Florida State University, helped the state of Mississippi improve reading results so much that its fourth-graders rose from 49th in the nation to 29th — the so-called “Mississippi Miracle.”&�Բ�����;

The 10 labs will now be able to begin the process of restarting their work for the remainder of the federal contract, the department revealed in a in June. 

A researcher who works with school districts to design programs said the centers could be reconceived to be more helpful to teachers: “There’s so much money. And if you think about what the products were, it’s hard in all cases to imagine that amount of money was yielding such exceptional change in the educational system that we need to keep going exactly as-is.”

This person noted that outfits like the RELs often benefit from the support of an “education improvement industrial complex” that lobbies for continued funding. The DOGE cuts, this person said, badly undercut that support system.

At the same time, a few observers said IES more broadly should continue, no matter what the fate of the Education Department in this administration. 

“I believe firmly that there should be an Institute for Education Sciences, even if it is configured differently,” said , senior director of the University of Chicago Education Lab. “Perhaps unsurprisingly, I believe in the power of R & D — and I think we need it more than ever, given declining test scores and the implications that has for our international competitiveness.”

Achievement is dropping across the board on NAEP scores, she noted. “So we have to start investing in this area if we’re going to make progress.”

For his part, Kelchen, the Tennessee scholar, said the disruptions of the administration’s first nine months haven’t taken too much of a toll on his work. Aside from an IES grant proposal that simply never got reviewed, he conducts research without federal assistance and without using federal restricted use data, which typically contains confidential information that isn’t publicly released. Accessing it requires an . 

But he said the chaos is changing his classroom: Last spring, he taught a graduate course and remembered, “Half the nights we met for class, there was some big announcement coming out of the Department of Education that affected higher ed finance,” disrupting what he thought the class would talk about. In one case, he said, a Feb. 10 discussion of higher ed expenditures was cut short by the news of DOGE’s IES grant cuts “breaking halfway through class.”

More broadly, Kelchen said the uncertainty is making everyone at the university uneasy. “It’s an interesting time to be an academic department head, just given that enrollment’s uncertain, funding’s uncertain,” he said. “We could have normal international student enrollment in a year. We could have zero. We just don’t know about anything.”

In the fall, the group won a National Science Foundation grant of nearly $1.5 million to teach elementary and middle-schoolers about climate-related issues in the U.S. Gulf Coast. The eagerly anticipated award came through NSF’s program.

But when she checked her NSF funding dashboard, the balance was $1.

Educators and researchers nationwide have been suffering similar shocks as the Trump administration raises a microscope — and in some cases an ax — to billions of dollars in federal research grants and contracts. On Monday, it said it had canceled dozens of Institute of Education Sciences contracts, worth an estimated $881 million and covering nearly the institute’s entire research portfolio, according to several sources. 

Last week, the NSF through billions of dollars in already-awarded grants in search of keywords that imply the researchers address gender ideology, diversity, equity and inclusion — all themes by the administration.

The moves — as well as a broader of all federal aid, which a judge has temporarily reversed — have spread uncertainty, fear and anger through the education research community. 

“It is incredibly exhausting,” said the research director of a national nonprofit with several active NSF grants and contracts. She asked to remain anonymous in order to speak freely. “It’s definitely absorbing all of our time right now.”&�Բ�����;

Interviews with more than a dozen key stakeholders found that researchers with studies already in the field are being forced to suddenly pause their research, not knowing if or when it will resume. Nearly all spoke only on condition of anonymity, fearing that speaking out publicly could jeopardize future funding.

While the administration has said the moves are an attempt to rein in federal spending that doesn’t comport with its priorities and values, it has offered no explanation for cuts to bedrock, non-political research around topics like math, literacy, school attendance, school quality and student mental health.

“It’s hard to believe this administration is serious about stopping the alarming decline of U.S. student achievement and competitiveness when it puts the kibosh on federally funded research and access to data,” said Robin Lake, director of the at Arizona State University. “How will policy makers and educators know the bright spots to replicate and what practices are harmful? How will parents make informed choices? How will teachers know the best ways to teach math and prepare students for the jobs of the future?”

CRPE currently receives no federal funding, she said, so the recent moves won’t affect it immediately. But its ongoing work tracking pandemic recovery, studying the impact of social media, AI and school choice rely on “a broad national infrastructure of data, subject experts, and rigorous field studies,” Lake said. “The broad-based destruction of this infrastructure will affect us all and will cripple our efforts to make American students competitive in the world economy.”

Ulrich Boser, CEO of , a Washington, D.C.-based organization that works in education research, likened the recent moves to remodeling a house to make it more efficient. “Would you just cancel all of your contracts with gas, water, electricity, and then just redo them? It’s not a logical way of doing things. It’s just haphazard.”

An Education Department spokesperson did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

The Learning Agency, which has contracts to, among other things, provide a that answers questions about IES’s What Works Clearinghouse, this week warning that GOP-backed plans to shut down the Education Department could mean the loss or delay of more than $70 billion in funding for students. 

Boser recalled that the recent debacle with college aid took place simply because the Education Department tried to . “It caused massive delays, most harmful to the kids we care about most.” Now take that dynamic, he said, and imagine what gutting an entire Cabinet-level agency could do. 

The recent NSF moves to review grant language are already having an effect: An academic dean at a leading graduate school of education said researchers at the institution are now reframing new funding proposals “in ways that allow them to ask the questions that they want” without being scrutinized — or eliminated altogether — “based on a ‘Ctrl-F review’ process.” Ctrl-F is a keyboard combination used to quickly search a document for keywords.

“I don’t think there’s an upside to the chaos and uncertainty that is being experienced in real time,” the dean said.

Likewise, the director of a research center that has long focused on K-12 education reform said the new administration has brought turmoil to a community that typically performs “non-ideological, empirical” research on issues like literacy and math.

 “I feel like every day there’s new confusion,” he said, adding that restrictions on DEI could also chill a basic function of education research: studying the results of interventions on diverse student populations — students of different races, ethnic backgrounds, economic levels and geographic locations.

“What ‘DEI’ means is really very ambiguous,” he said. “So if you are studying something and you look at differential outcomes between groups, is that DEI? I don’t know.”&�Բ�����;

A ‘Man-Made Disaster’

The federal government funds billions of dollars in research each year for K-12 and higher education, but rarely has it scrutinized practitioners to this extent, said the leader of a nonprofit that advocates for better education research. 

She described conversations with scholars who are operating via grants through NSF, IES and elsewhere who “just have no idea what’s going on — they can’t get through to program officers. Sometimes program officers have been put on administrative leave. It’s just a huge amount of chaos, and overall [it] just creates this chilling effect” for both current grantees and future ones.

“This is a man-made disaster,” she said.

Mike England, an NSF spokesman, said the agency “is working expeditiously to conduct a comprehensive review of our projects, programs and activities to be compliant with the existing executive orders.” He referred a journalist to an outlining recent executive orders “and their impact on the U.S. National Science Foundation community.”

An Education Department official on Tuesday said any IES contracts required by law will be re-issued for new competition, but Mark Schneider, who served as the agency’s director in Trump’s first term, said in an interview that the current chaos represents an opportunity to “make something good” in the research realm.

“What we should really do is say, ‘We’ve fallen into a rut for decades in the way we go about doing business,’” he said. “‘We are not focused on the highest reward. We’re not focused on mission-critical work.’ ” 

Now a nonresident senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Schneider has already suggested breaking the Education Department up and distributing its work to other agencies. He said the new administration has the opportunity to refocus to provide “data that the nation needs.”

Schneider noted that the National Center for Education Research last year handed out 42 research grants worth well over $100 million. “If we look at those grants, how many of those are really mission-critical?” He predicted that few focus on improving literacy instruction, which recent NAEP results suggest is in crisis.

The department did not release a list of zeroed-out programs, but a document online indicates that they include research covering a wide range of topics including literacy but also math, science, mental health, attendance, English acquisition and others. Also on the chopping block: contracts for The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (), a test given to students every four years in 64 countries and a key indicator of U.S. competitiveness.

‘I just don’t want more asterisk years’

The long-term impact of research pauses could be devastating, said the senior advisor to a research advocacy group — comparable to the interruption of the COVID epidemic, which shut many researchers out of schools for months, diluting the effectiveness of their research and, in some cases, requiring them to insert asterisks for the years when no data was available.

“I just don’t want more asterisk years,” she said. 

Several researchers said an even bigger fear is the prospect of key education, labor and other data sets such as NAEP being made unavailable. While NAEP data collection was unaffected by the recent moves, contracts to analyze the data and report it publicly were canceled, to be offered to new bidders. So far, U.S. Education Department data haven’t been affected, but public health data — including guidance on contraception, a fact sheet about HIV and transgender people; and lessons on building supportive school environments for transgender and nonbinary students — have from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website due to President Trump’s order to strip “gender ideology” from websites and contracts.

Amy O’Hara, a research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School for Public Policy, cautioned that removing data from public websites would “have a chilling effect on what can be done, what can be measured, what services we deliver to our communities.”

Even if some research funds are restored and researchers can go back to work, O’Hara said, she worries about the uncertainty created at the collegiate graduate school level, as well as for researchers who are early in their careers. “If their funding is disrupted and their access to data is disrupted, they have an incentive to walk away,” she said. “And if they walk away and find other work to do, what is going to be compelling to bring them back?”

CRPE’s Lake put it more bluntly: “I’m a very pragmatic researcher and I believe the feds could do much better in how they fund and support research. But a wholesale end to federal investment in education research feels like a cop-out. The hard but necessary work is making smarter investments.”