Sizing Up DOGE’s Education Contract Cuts: What’s Been Targeted

At least 40 different organizations had agreements with the U.S. Department of Education’s research branch—the Institute of Education Sciences—abruptly terminated, according to an EdWeek Market Brief review of information released publicly by the Department of Government Efficiency.

Organizations hit by the cuts include major players in the education research space, such as the American Institutes for Research in the Behavioral Sciences, Mathematica, and the Research Triangle Institute.

Some of the agreements were created under mandates from Congress or in response to lawmakers’ requests — a fact acknowledged in their brief line-item descriptions included on the site created by the DOGE, a cost-cutting entity led by billionaire Elon Musk, whose work has been championed by President Donald Trump.

Last month, the DOGE announced cuts worth millions of dollars to Department of Education contracts. The move was a significant step toward fulfilling President Donald Trump’s vow to dismantle, or at least greatly downsize, the longstanding federal education agency.

A number of contracts that had been cut were added to the DOGE “wall of receipts” — a website it says catalogs some of the savings the actions have created. The site compiles cuts across the federal government, including education.

It is one of many actions the executive branch has taken to reduce the education agency in recent weeks. Most recently, the Trump administration announced that it will impose massive layoffs to reduce department staff by about half.

Terminations of the IES contracts are expected to be especially impactful in the K-12 marketplace, as some research organizations laid off staff members in the wake of the cuts. In addition, school districts rely on scientific evidence to choose high-quality educational products, and many vendors have sought to get their products’ research featured in the federal government’s online clearinghouse.

EdWeek Market Brief compiled a list of all the Education Department contracts as of March 5 that the DOGE reported as having cancelled.

They were then cross-referenced using the pre-existing list on IES’ official website of active contracts for the first quarter of fiscal year 2025.

The Department of Government Efficiency and Department of Education did not respond to EdWeek Market Brief’s requests for comment on how contracts were selected or offer clarification on any of the inconsistencies our review found.

When asked by press last week about the DOGE and the public criticism about its actions, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Musk’s team is fulfilling Trump’s campaign promise.

“There should be no secret about the fact that this administration is committed to cutting waste, fraud, and abuse,” she said.

While much of the information on the DOGE site is incomplete, here are a few key questions and answers that can be gleaned from the publicly available data:

Is there an independently confirmed total for how much money these cuts saved?

• No. In a Feb. 10 post on X, the DOGE said it had canceled 89 Education Department contracts, creating savings totaling $881 million — a number EdWeek Market Brief’s review was unable to confirm.
• The savings from all Education Department contracts listed on the DOGE website as of March 5 added up to $624 million across 120 contracts. That figure includes cancellations that were dated after the Feb. 10 post, with the latest uploads dated Feb. 28.
• It is not clear if the listings on the DOGE website are complete. The self-described bureaucracy-cutting entity says it represents a portion of what has been done, but will be updated weekly and can have up to a one-month lag.

What do we know about the reported savings for IES?

• For many of the IES contracts, it is not immediately clear how the DOGE arrived at its reported savings number.
• In four instances, the amount the cost-cutting office said was saved is larger than the total contract value it listed.
• In one example, the DOGE reported the total value of a contract with The Manhattan Strategy Group LLC was $1.7 million, while listing the savings from the contract termination as $2.8 million. The contract was for the support and dissemination of National Center for Education Statistics “reports and data products for data collections.”

Which organizations lost the most IES contracts?

• Two organizations each had 15 agreements marked as cancelled — the most of any of the organizations on the list of contracts reported by the DOGE and confirmed on the IES report: Mathematica Inc. and The American Institutes for Research in the Behavioral Sciences.
• The Research Triangle Institute had the next-highest number of deals negated, at seven.

How significant of a cut is this to IES?

• IES reported 561 active contracts during the first quarter of fiscal year 2025.
• EdWeek Market Brief was able to confirm that 103 of those active contracts were listed as cancelled on the DOGE’s website, or roughly 18 percent.
• Three of the contracts listed on the DOGE’s site were previously reported by IES as having an ultimate completion date in 2024, which is before Trump took office.
• Most of the IES contracts targeted by the DOGE were set to end by 2028. A dozen were listed by IES with ultimate completion dates in 2029. Three were listed as ending in 2030.

Were some IES contracts fulfilling mandates from Congress?

• Two contracts on the DOGE site of axed education programs specifically mention Congress in their short line-item descriptions. Of those, one says the program will “report to Congress” the data collected as part of the contract and the second says it is for a “congressionally mandated evaluation.”
• One contract references the work being authorized by the Every Student Succeeds Act, a broad federal education law.
• Eleven contracts are for work related to the Regional Educational Laboratories, which offer research and technical support to states and districts and are protected by congressional mandates.
• The reference to Congress is notable because it offers insight into which contract terminations could, in theory, face pushback from lawmakers down the road.

See a full list of the contracts that the DOGE reported as terminated below, which EdWeek Market Brief was able to confirm were on IES’ list of active contracts for fiscal year 2025.