DOGE terminates $881 million in Institute of Education Sciences contracts

DOGE cancelled 169 IES contracts worth a reported $881 million, ordering researchers and contractors to stop work immediately on federally financed education research, program evaluations, and data collections; contemporaneous reporting described the federal education-research institute as "all but shut down." The cuts eliminated the contract infrastructure for national education data collections, including surveys that had begun measuring outcomes for LGBTQ students; the administration separately moved to strip gender-identity items from federal surveys (see section 12). (See also section 5.)