At the meeting on Monday, the employees were informed that the Ministry of Government Effectiveness (DOGE), a unit of the Trump administration led by Elon Musk, plans to cancel most of the IES contracts. Two employees shared captures of email screens summoning them to this meeting.
Employees have described a dark mood where some have fought tears, and others have raised questions about the future of the IES.
One of the employees who spoke with NPR said that all the contracts they supervise had been terminated. “So that poses the question, what does that mean for our jobs?”
Another employee was skeptical about the idea that these cuts would lead to more efficiency. “If they do this to save money from the government, they waste millions today. All the money we spent on working on these products, down. »»
NPR has contacted the Ministry of Education and the White House to comment. The White House did not respond. A spokesperson for the Department of Education responded by sharing a link to a Monday evening post on the X account for DOGE.
The post said: “The Ministry of Education has terminated 89 contracts worth $ 881 million” and that “an entrepreneur was paid $ 1.5 million to” observe shipping and office “in a mail center”.
But a third source having an in -depth knowledge of many of these contracts in the canceled education department, which would not speak publicly for fear of reprisals, said that a closed program was already underway in classrooms – To study the means to help students on a national scale to compensate for the land they “I lost in mathematics.
According to this source, students of several states were already working with high -quality adaptive digital tools. Now, with the cancellation of this contract, the study will be interrupted and the learning tools could soon be withdrawn from the classrooms.
The canceled contracts also include surveys and collecting data on a range of problems, including private schools, home studies and vocational and technical training programs.
“This is a decimation,” said the source at NPR, “the destruction of knowing what works for children.”
“It’s shocking, it’s useless,” said Thomas Weko, a former NCES commissioner, referring to the majority of research work.
He added that the creation of IES was “an attempt to put our understanding of education on a scientific basis with other areas of knowledge such as medicine”.
If contracts related to IES and NCES are indeed terminated and its research becomes unavailable online, a range of data collected during several decades on the state of education in the United States could become difficult to access . We do not know what these contractual endings would mean for the future data collection.
According to the employees with which NPR, the national evaluation of educational progress (NAEP), will be preserved, at least for the moment. NAEP, also known as the Bulletin of the country, is the ordeal in the evaluations of students’ success and publishes widely used data on the way in which students from kindergarten in the 12th year are presented in matters main, including mathematics and reading.
President Trump said on several occasions that he planned to close the education service, which employs more than 4,000 people and has an annual budget of $ 79 billion.
He told Fox News in an interview that broadcast on Sunday: “I will say very soon (Elon Musk), as maybe in 24 hours, to check the Ministry of Education. He will find the same thing. Then I’m going to go, go to the army. Check the army. We will find billions, hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud and abuse. »»
In recent days, administration officials have also placed dozens of employees from the Department of Education on Administrative Leave paid with little explanation. At the time, the White House confirmed the president’s plans to close programs within the department which are not protected by law and its plans to call on the congress to close the department completely.
