I'm not sure I trust DOGE's numbers...

Which IES contracts were canceled? And why?

On Monday, the “Department” of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Twitter account claimed it had canceled 89 Institute of Education Science (IES) contracts worth $881 million. The media has run with this figure, but I had a few questions…

Which contracts exactly were canceled? How will it affect future work? And how is DOGE calculating “savings?”

For starters, the $881 million figure quoted by DOGE is more than the entire annual budget for IES. DOGE’s claims could still make sense mathematically if they terminated some multi-year grants. We know from other reporting that programs like NAEP and IPEDS were spared. Assuming they’re not blatantly ignoring congressionally mandated programs¹, that narrows the field even more.

But it gets weirder. I hadn’t seen a full list of which contracts were canceled, or which research programs they would affect, until Crooked Media’s Matt Berg posted the list alongside DOGE’s talking points on Twitter.

If you compare these documents, you can see that DOGE is sloppy, lying, or being intentionally misleading. For example, their talking points say the cancellations do not affect research associated with students with disabilities, and yet the list of cancelled contracts includes a $12.6 million study on post-high school outcomes for youth with disabilities and a $350,000 contract for the National Center for Special Education Research. What gives?

The rest of the list is even more confusing. There are “task orders” and one-off meetings and tech support activities that I don’t recognize. And then lots of stuff that looks like it was about to expire. For example, how much work was there left to be done for the $15.7 million contract for the administration of the 2023 TIMSS assessment? Or the 2019-20 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (a $48 million study) and the High School and Beyond Longitudinal Study of 2020 (a $42 million contract)? Were these just early terminations, or was there still ongoing work yet to be completed?

And if there was more substantive work to be done on these contracts, why exactly did DOGE cancel them?

This last point is the most important one. And it goes to the heart of this whole fiasco. As someone who uses IES data products on a weekly and sometimes daily basis, I’m alarmed at the prospect of political tampering with those data collection efforts.

Among many other items on the cancelations list was an evaluation of the Striving Readers program, the federal government’s largest investment in the science of reading; an evaluation of grant programs to increase school-based mental health services; and an impact study to evaluate programs to accelerate math learning. Why, exactly, were these contracts canceled?

I'm trying to hold out judgment. But given all these questions, I’m not exactly sure I trust DOGE to give us a straight answer…

1. Is this a safe assumption? I don’t know! But that’s all the more reason the public deserves more information.