The Republican Plot to Destroy Education Research

The Republican Plot to Destroy Education Research

Elon Musk and the Trump administration have gutted the Institute of Education Science.


by Chris Lewis

October 16, 2025



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The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.

Good data drives good decision-making, and education is no exception. The data provided to researchers from independent research organizations, public-private partnerships, and other institutions helps teachers, administrators, and lawmakers make good decisions about how to approach schooling.
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That’s why it is critical to highlight the Trump administration’s assault on public data at the Department of Education—just one part of its war on public education in general.

In February, Elon Musk and his DOGE team cut a total of 89 contracts worth $881 million from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the research and data arm of the department. This obscure organization is critical in ensuring that schools from K-12 to college are funded and competitive, and that students are getting financial aid. The contracts were for vendors that helped the institute collect essential data, including the effectiveness of transition support for young people with disabilities and common education standards (which includes common vocabulary data and tools to help education stakeholders).

A 2002 product of the Bush administration, the point of the IES is to improve education outcomes in the United States by providing high-quality data and analysis for state and federal governments. As the New America foundation puts it, IES’s role is to research what works. The institute has four major research arms: the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the National Center for Special Education Research, the National Center for Education Research, and the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance. Each performs a pivotal role in education data gathering for stakeholders.

Related: Trump’s Education Department cuts funding allocated to minority-serving institutions

NCES, for example, collects and reports information on student performance and achievement based on standardized test scores, as well as the literacy level of adults. Its data is used by a host of different parties, from researchers to legislators, to understand and improve enrollment, benchmarks, and the performance of educational initiatives. Factoring everything from student performance to teaching techniques to administrators into the data helps inform financial aid, basic needs gaps, and many issues that students face. The data provided by NCES is used by lawmakers to help make decisions on district funding allocations. Without it, there are no reliable, objective metrics to help determine schools’ needs.

The data provided by IES also helps elevate student populations that would otherwise be entirely ignored. Take student parents, people trying to balance getting an education with raising a child. The GAINS for Student Parents Act requires public colleges to give student parents information about services and resources, as well as adjusting costs of attendance and net price valuations to include dependent care. IES data helped elevate an almost entirely invisible population of students that faces unique problems; there aren’t national political organizations for student parents, so lawmakers would have been fairly oblivious to this population’s needs without this data.

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And the numbers here are not small. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, undergraduate students who are either parents, guardians, or pregnant while in college make up nearly one-fifth of the student population. They don’t have the institutional support offered to non-parent students, and often work more than 40 hours a week between both work and school, because financial aid is typically not enough to live on. A comprehensive picture of these students only exists due to data collected through the IES’s National Postsecondary Student Aid Study.

In short, IES is a vital partner to schools, districts, policymakers, and researchers. In theory, it is a nonpartisan entity, merely conducting research and providing the resulting data to anyone, and hitherto its value has been recognized by Democrats and Republicans alike.

But no longer. As Musk’s assault on the agency shows, education of any kind is now a partisan issue. The Trump administration is refusing to publicize data that bear on the needs of marginalized people because American conservatives are now dead set against the very idea of public education of any kind. The cuts to IES are just one part of this effort.

Currently, IES can barely function. Due to the 1,300 layoffs at the Department of Education under Education Secretary Linda McMahon—a woman who, not coincidentally, is so comically ignorant she confused AI with the A1 steak sauce—IES has a mere 20 federal employees left. According to The Hechinger Report, there are only three people left to do the work of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, NAEP, which is the common measure of K-12 achievement through standardized tests. Ultimately, the layoffs will result in less and lower-quality data that can be provided to stakeholders to help ensure student and teacher success.

Good education requires data that helps educators personalize instruction, make adjustments to the rigor of the curriculum, and overall ensure that students are learning. Administrators use good data to help build out smart reforms or set specific goals for their students or teachers. The assault on this research and data agency is yet another example of the administration’s disregard of the material consequences of its wrongheaded fight against expertise.

While forcing prestigious universities such as the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard to bend the knee gets the most attention from the mainstream media, what Trump is doing to IES will have a far broader and deeper impact on American schools. If he and McMahon have anything to say about it, in the future only wealthy white people will have access to a quality education in this country.