The cut continued to come. At the end of Thursday, the education department announced that it had terminated an additional 10 research and technical assistance contracts with its regional education laboratories totaling $ 336 million. In this case, the administration said it was aimed at ideologically -driven costs, such as a project that advised schools in Ohio to conduct “audits of equity”.
The federal grants of university researchers were largely not affected in the abbreviations announced on Monday, although some teachers served as advisers or subcontractors in terminated contracts with private research organizations. Texas Education Professor in Texas Sarah Powell said US institutes of research told her to stop working on two mathematics teachers in evidence -based ways, to teach STEMs, citing science, technology, engineering And mathematics. Another guide for teachers on evidence of evidence, ways to combat students’ absence, was also killed. Without these guidelines, it can be difficult for teachers to know which research to trust.
In interview With Propublica, a spokesman for the Ministry of Education has identified the terminated contracts as examples of “waste, fraud and abuse”. Of X, Education Department shared Three examples of wasteful costs that have been cut: $ 3 million for a report to show that previous reports have not been used, $ 4.6 million to coordinate meetings for increase and personality and contract for $ 1.5 million to monitor postal and clerical operations. But neither dozh, who claims to be doing full transparency, nor does the education department identify which contracts contain these costs, nor have they released a complete list of canceled contracts.
The range of cuts was unclear to many researchers. An unverified spreadsheet From the canceled contracts distributed to X. It was published by a journalist at Croked Media, founded by former speeches and communications staff in the Obama administration. Journalist Matt Berg said he had received it from a senior career employee in the education department and believes that the list was prepared by DOG. Several former employees of the education department have recognized the contracts and told me that the list, if not in the dollar, seems to be accurate.
Rachel Dinks, Head of the Knowledge Alliance, which is advocating for research organizations receiving federal funding such as Mathematica and American Institutes for Research, said its organization had been checked by its members that at least 56 of the 89 TAB contracts were canceled. By the end of last week, she was still working to confirm the rest of the list.
Among the cancellation was an 11-year study of young people with disabilities, which Dinkes said was completed halfway. He had to identify which programs were effective in improving employment and educational results for these high school students. More than 1,000 young people with disabilities had to receive special instructions and support in 2025 and 2026 through this study, which has already been discontinued.
During the hearing to confirm last week for the Candidate for Education Secretary Linda McMahon, the Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine said her office heard from a former teacher in her country who used one of the discontinued grants to develop a program for a program for a program. Lessons. “Given the bad reading and mathematics results … Shouldn’t the Ministry of Education continue to collect the data and evaluate the results, not stop these activities so that you can help countries know what works well?” McMahon surrounds The question, saying it will “evaluate these programs” if confirmed.
Treaties for administering the national assessment of educational progress (NAEP), a test appointed by Congress, which traces the students’ achievements, were not directly terminated. But Mark Schneider, a former director of the Institute of Education Sciences, which manages these research and data contracts, explained that other K-12 data collections rely on NAEP. Statistics cannot create nationally representative samples from students to take the NAEP test without data on students’ demographic data.
A separate collection of data from colleges and universities, called an integrated secondary data system, was spared by the abbreviations, said Dinks, as well as the indicative college card, which tracks whether students find good payments to pay after graduation.
I talked to more than 20 researchers, most of whom asked me to preserve their identity anonymously out of fear of retribution from the Trump administration. Some only communicated with me through encrypted channels and refused to send an email or talk on the phone.
Based on these interviews, it seems unlikely that taxpayers will derive $ 881 million in savings from cancellation. Perennial contracts are paid over time and in many cases much of the money has already been paid. When I searched for contract numbers online, sometimes they were much smaller than what the unverified spreadsheet of Doge listed. For example, a contract listed for $ 19 million was actually $ 14 million. Six years of the seven-year contract have already passed and most of the contract amount has probably been paid.
Speaking to reporters in the oval cabinet last week, Dog Elon Musk admitted that his team would make mistakes. “We are moving fast, so we will make mistakes, but we will also correct the mistakes very quickly,” Musk said.
However, researchers explained to me that it would not be easy to restart any of these contracts. Some say the government will have to start a new competitive bidding process and sign new contracts. In addition, the protection of the privacy of students may prevent researchers from maintaining the years of research that has already been completed.
“Many of these contracts have clauses to delete data,” a researcher told me. “The fact is that they will not be able to reopen them if they change their minds. They are not just a pause. They are discontinued and we lose the information. “
The clock is already ticking. Researchers said they had 30 days from the date of cancellation to the turning projects. While they are confronted to complete this unexpected task, they also described another time for work time: replacing the word “gender” with “sex” in each of their government contracts that have not been canceled according to the White House Directive S The modification requires a legal examination and adds to overhead costs. “It’s ironic,” a researcher said. “They call themselves the Ministry of Government. But they just lose money. “
