Tag: DOGE

  • Do transgender student athletics fall under DOGE Subcommittee jurisdiction?

    Do transgender student athletics fall under DOGE Subcommittee jurisdiction?

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    Do transgender student athletes’ involvement in girls’ and women’s sports — an issue that has recently jeopardized schools’ federal funding — fall under government efficiency and oversight? That question starkly divided lawmakers among party lines in a nearly 4-hour hearing on Wednesday held by the Delivering on Government Efficiency Subcommittee, a newly-formed subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. 

    The DOGE Subcommittee hearing — meant to discuss the politically charged issue of Title IX and transgender student rights that has taken center stage under the Trump administration — quickly deteriorated to repeated gavel-banging, a motion to adjourn the meeting, disagreement over the committee’s purpose, arguments over lawmakers’ allotted speaking times, and discussions of differences in male and female elbow-joint anatomy and muscle mass. 

    The subcommittee was created to oversee “federal civil service, including compensation, classification, and benefits; federal property disposal; government reorganizations and operations, including transparency, performance, grants management, and accounting measures generally,” according to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s rule book. 

    Witnesses included two cisgender female athletes advocating for athletic teams without transgender students, the chair for the USA Fencing Board of Directors, and the CEO of National Women’s Law Center, a nonprofit organization that advocates for LGBTQ+ rights.

    Republican lawmakers, who have called for less federal oversight of education and a return of that power to the states, said the hearing was necessary because it related to Title IX, a federal law meant to prohibit sex discrimination in federally funded education programs. 

    “It’s an important issue that biological men stay out of women’s sports,” said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, chair of the committee and Republican from Georgia. 

    Rep. William Timmons, R-S.C., said the hearing was meant to “shine a light not only on the integrity of women’s sports,” but also on how institutions like USA Fencing and others may be misusing their authority to “push controversial policies that violate basic human rights and disregard their Congressionally-authorized mission.”

    “This is what happens when you allow God to be pushed out of everything,” added Rep. Eli Crane, R-Ariz. 

    Democratic lawmakers at the hearing, however, said it was a waste of the subcommittee’s time and did not fall under the body’s jurisdiction, which instead includes issues like proposed cuts across the government. 

    “This subcommittee could be focusing on the layoffs that President Trump has executed: over 200,000 firings of federal employees,” said Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass. “That does affect the efficiency of our government programs.” 

    Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., concurred, saying the subcommittee has “never really talked about government efficiency or any serious legislative work,” and that he was “surprised that this subcommittee is not apparently in charge of policing women’s sports.” 

    Witnesses at a DOGE Subcommittee hearing raise their hands in oath

    Stephanie Turner, left, a fencer who refused to compete against a transgender athlete, and Payton McNabb, right, a former North Carolina high school volleyball player injured by a transgender opponent, are sworn in during the hearing held by the Delivering on Government Efficiency Subcommittee at the U.S. Capitol on May 7, 2025, in Washington, D.C.

    Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images via Getty Images

     

    DOGE impacts on K-12

    The DOGE Subcommittee is among the latest in a series of efforts by the Trump administration and Republicans to cut back on what they say are instances of abuse, fraud and waste in the government. Its formation is an extension of similar efforts conducted by the Department of Government Efficiency, also referred to as DOGE. 

    Those efforts have had major implications for the K-12 sector in recent months, including gutting the Education Department by laying off more than 1,300 employees, closing or significantly reducing its offices, canceling grants entirely or retracting grant competitions, and proposing a 15% cut to the department’s funding. 

    The reduction in expenses from DOGE’s efforts is also expected to put a strain on K-12 finances, according to a Moody’s report released in April. 

    Among DOGE cuts were seven of the Education Department’s 12 local offices for the Office for Civil Rights, leaving schools with reduced oversight of civil rights compliance. Those offices were in charge of investigating allegations of Title IX violations — the subject of the hearing Wednesday — for half of states. 

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  • Pasco-Hernando President Resigns Amid State DOGE Scrutiny

    Pasco-Hernando President Resigns Amid State DOGE Scrutiny

    Pasco-Hernando State College president Jesse Pisors has resigned after less than 18 months on the job, amid scrutiny from Florida’s version of the Department of Government Efficiency, The Tampa Bay Times reported.

    Pisors stepped down Thursday, the day before a special meeting called by board chair Marilyn Pearson-Adams to discuss concerns about student growth and retention, according to meeting documents. In a letter to other trustees, which included analysis from Florida’s DOGE on student growth and retention, Pearson-Adams noted the college was among the worst on those metrics.

    Specifically, she noted PHSC was second-to-last in retention numbers, which she called “alarming.” She added that trustees “had not been made aware of these numbers” despite “our continued requests over the past 12 months regarding this type of information and data.”

    The agenda shows only one action item for Friday’s special meeting of the Pasco-Hernando Board of Trustees: “Determination of Sustainability of College’s Future.” 

    Florida is one of several states that has sought to implement cost-cutting measures modeled on DOGE, the federal initiative led by billionaire bureaucrat Elon Musk to reduce government waste through layoffs and the elimination of various programs—an effort that has run into multiple legal challenges. DOGE-driven cuts have also fallen far short of their intended vision, with Musk often exaggerating savings for taxpayers in his work for the Trump administration. 

    Florida’s DOGE has also sought records of all faculty research at public institutions published in the last six years, leading to concerns about how the effort may be weaponized against faculty.

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  • Education research takes another hit in latest DOGE attack

    Education research takes another hit in latest DOGE attack

    Education research has a big target on its back.

    Of the more than 1,000 National Science Foundation grants killed last month by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, some 40 percent were inside its education division. These grants to further STEM education research accounted for a little more than half of the $616 million NSF committed for projects canceled by DOGE, according to Dan Garisto, a freelance journalist reporting for Nature, a peer-reviewed scientific journal that also covers science news.

    The STEM education division gives grants to researchers at universities and other organizations who study how to improve the teaching of math and science, with the goal of expanding the number of future scientists who will fuel the U.S. economy. Many of the studies are focused on boosting the participation of women or Black and Hispanic students. The division had a roughly $1.2 billion budget out of NSF’s total annual budget of $9 billion. 

    Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.

    Neither the NSF nor the Trump administration has provided a list of the canceled grants. Garisto told me that he obtained a list from an informal group of NSF employees who cobbled it together themselves. That list was subsequently posted on Grant Watch, a new project to track the Trump administration’s termination of grants at scientific research agencies. Garisto has been working with outside researchers at Grant Watch and elsewhere to document the research dollars that are affected and analyze the list for patterns. 

    “For NSF, we see that the STEM education directorate has been absolutely pummeled,” Noam Ross, a computational disease ecologist and one of the Grant Watch researchers, posted on Bluesky. 

    Terminated grants fall heavily upon STEM Education 

    Graphic by Dan Garisto, a freelance journalist working for Nature

    The steep cuts to NSF education research follow massive blows in February and March at the Department of Education, where almost 90 research and data collection projects were canceled along with the elimination of Regional Education Laboratories and the firing of almost 90 percent of the employees in the research and data division, known as the Institute of Education Sciences.

    Many, but not all, of the canceled research projects at NSF were also in a database of 3,400 research grants compiled by Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican. Cruz characterized them as “questionable projects that promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.”  

    Ross at Grant Watch analyzed the titles and abstracts or summaries of the terminated projects and discovered that “Black” was the most frequent word among them. Other common words were “climate,” “student,” “network,” “justice,” “identity,” “teacher,” and “undergraduate.”

    Frequent words in the titles and summaries of terminated NSF research projects

    Word cloud of the most frequent terms from the titles and abstracts of terminated grants, with word size proportional to frequency. Purple is the most frequent, followed by orange and green. Source: Noam Ross, Grant Watch

    At least two of the terminated research studies focused on improving artificial intelligence education, which President Donald Trump promised to promote in an April 23 executive order,“Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth.” 

    “There is something especially offensive about this EO from April 23 about the need for AI education… Given the termination of my grant on exactly this topic on April 26,” said Danaé Metaxa in a post on Bluesky that has since been deleted. Metaxa, an assistant professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania, was developing a curriculum on how to teach AI digital literacy skills by having students build and audit generative AI models. 

    Related: Chaos and confusion as the statistics arm of the Education Department is reduced to a skeletal staff of 3

    Another canceled grant involved college students creating educational content about AI for social media to see if that content would improve AI literacy and the ability to detect misinformation. The lead researcher, Casey Fiesler, an associate professor of information science at the University of Colorado Boulder, was almost midway through her two-year grant of less than $270,000. “There is not a DEI aspect of this work,” said Fiesler. “My best guess is that the reason it was flagged was the word ‘misinformation.’”

    Confusion surrounded the cuts. Bob Russell, a former NSF project officer who retired in 2024, said some NSF project officers were initially unaware that the grants they oversee had been canceled. Instead, university officials who oversee research were told, and those officials notified researchers at their institutions. Researchers then contacted their project officers. One researcher told me that the termination notice states that researchers may not appeal the decision, an administrative process that is ordinarily available to researchers who feel that NSF has made an unfair or incorrect decision. 

    Related: DOGE’s death blow to education studies

    Some of the affected researchers were attending the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in Denver on April 26 when more than 600 grants were cut. Some scholars found out by text that their studies had been terminated. Normally festive evening receptions were grim. “It was like a wake,” said one researcher. 

    The Trump administration wants to slash NSF’s budget and headcount in half, according to Russell. Many researchers expect more cuts ahead.

    Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or barshay@hechingerreport.org.

    This story about NSF education research cuts was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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  • In some states, colleges face a double dose of DOGE

    In some states, colleges face a double dose of DOGE

    Oklahoma wants some of its less-expensive universities to cut travel and operational costs, consolidate departments and reduce energy use — all in the name of saving money.

    Already, earning a degree at one of these regional institutions is relatively inexpensive for students, costing in total as much as $15,000 less per year than bigger state universities in Oklahoma. And the schools, including Southeastern Oklahoma State University and the University of Central Oklahoma, graduate more teachers and nurses than those research institutions. Those graduates can fill critically needed roles for the state.

    Still, state policymakers think there are more efficiencies to be found.

    Higher education is one of the specific areas targeted by a new state-run agency with a familiar name, with the goal of “protecting our Oklahoma way of life,” Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt said in the first DOGE-OK report this spring. The Oklahoma Division of Government Efficiency, created around the same time as the federal entity with a similar title, counts among its accomplishments so far shifting to automated lawn mowers to cut grass at the state capital, changing to energy-efficient LED lighting and cutting down on state government cell phone bills. The Oklahoma governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment about this effort.

    Oklahoma is one of about a dozen states that has considered an approach similar to the federal DOGE, though some state attempts were launched before the Trump administration’s. The federal Department of Government Efficiency, established the day Trump took office on Jan. 20, has commanded deep cuts to federal spending and the federal workforce, with limited justification.

    As academia becomes a piñata for President Donald Trump and his supporters, Republican state lawmakers and governors are assembling in line: They want to get their whacks in too.

    Related: Interested in more news about colleges and universities? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.

    Beyond Oklahoma, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis launched FL DOGE in February, with a promise to review state university and college operations and spending. Republicans in the Ohio statehouse formed an Ohio DOGE caucus. One of the Iowa DOGE Task Force’s three main goals is “further refining workforce and job training programs,” some of which are run through community colleges, and its members include at least two people who work at state universities.

    The current political environment represents “an unprecedented attack on higher education,” said Veena Dubal, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and general counsel for the American Association of University Professors.

    The state-level scrutiny comes atop those federal job cuts, which include layoffs of workers who interact with colleges, interdepartmental spending cuts that affect higher education and the shrinking of contracts that support research and special programs at colleges and universities. Other research grants have been canceled outright. The White House is pursuing these spending cuts at the same time as it is using colleges’ diversity efforts, their handling of antisemitism and their policies about transgender athletes to force a host of changes that go beyond cost-cutting — such as rules about how students protest and whether individual university departments require more supervision.

    Florida Atlantic University students Zayla Robinson, Aadyn Hoots and Meadow Swantic (from left to right) sit together at the Boca Raton campus. Swantic objects to Florida’s efforts to dictate what subjects universities can or can’t teach: “You can’t erase history.” Credit: Michael Vasquez for The Hechinger Report

    Higher education, which relies heavily on both state dollars and federal funding in the form of student loans and Pell grants, research grants and workforce training programs, faces the prospect of continued, and painful, budget cuts.

    “Institutions are doing things under the threat of extinction,” Dubal said. “They’re not making measured decisions about what’s best for the institution, or best for the public good.”

    For instance, the Trump administration extracted a number of pledges from Columbia University as part of its antisemitism charge, suspending $400 million in federal grants and contracts as leverage. This led campus faculty and labor unions to sue, citing an assault on academic freedom. (The Hechinger Report is in an independent unit of Teachers College.) Now Harvard faces a review of $9 billion in federal funding, also over antisemitism allegations, and the list of universities under similar scrutiny is only growing.

    Related: The Hechinger Report’s Tuition Tracker helps reveal the real cost of college

    Budget cuts are nothing new for higher education — when a recession hits, it is one of the first places state lawmakers look to cut, in blue states or red. One reason: Public universities can sometimes make up the difference with tuition increases.

    What DOGE brings, in Washington and statehouses, is something new. The DOGE approach is engaging in aggressive cost-cutting that specifically targets certain programs that some politicians don’t like, said Jeff Selingo, a special adviser to the president at Arizona State University.

    “It’s definitely more political than it is fiscal or policy-oriented,” said Selingo, who is also the author of several books on higher education.

    “Universities haven’t done what certain politicians wanted them to do,” he added. “This is a way to control them, in a way.”

    The current pressure on Florida colleges extends far beyond budget matters. DeSantis has criticized college campuses as “intellectually repressive environments.” In 2021, Florida state lawmakers passed a law, signed by the governor, to fight this perceived ideological bent by requiring a survey of public university professors and students to assess whether there is enough intellectual diversity on campus.

    A diversity-themed bus transports students at the University of Central Florida’s Orlando campus. Credit: Michael Vasquez for The Hechinger Report

    At New College in Sarasota, DeSantis led an aggressive cultural overhaul to transform the college’s atmosphere and identity into something more politically conservative. The governor has cited Hillsdale College, a conservative private Christian institution in Michigan, as a role model.

    Faculty and students at New College sued. Their complaints included allegations of academic censorship and a hostile environment for LGBTQ+ students, many of whom transferred elsewhere. One lawsuit was ultimately dropped. Since the takeover, the college added athletics programs and said it has attracted a record number of new and transfer students.

    Related: A case study of what’s ahead with Trump DEI crackdowns

    Across America, Republicans control both the legislature and the governor’s mansion in 23 states, compared with 15 states fully controlled by Democrats. In those GOP-run states, creating a mini-DOGE carries the potential for increased political might, with little oversight.

    In Florida, “state DOGE serves as an intimidation device,” one high-ranking public university administrator told The Hechinger Report. The administrator, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, said “there’s also just this atmosphere of fear.”

    In late March, university presidents received a letter signed by the “DOGE Team” at the governor’s office. The letter promised a thorough review by FL DOGE officials, with site visits and the expectation that each college appoint a designated liaison to handle FL DOGE’s ongoing requests.

    The letter highlighted some of the items FL DOGE might request going forward, including course codes, descriptions and syllabi; full detail of all centers established on campus; and “the closure and dissolution of DEI programs and activities, as required by law.”

    The student union at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, launched FL DOGE in February, promising to review state university and college operations and spending. Credit: Michael Vasquez for The Hechinger Report

    The state did not respond to a question about whether FL DOGE is designed to attack higher education in the state. Molly Best, the deputy press secretary, noted that FL DOGE is now up and running, and cities and counties are also receiving letters requesting certain information and that the public will be updated in the future. 

    DOGE in Florida also follows other intervention in higher education in the state: Florida’s appointed Board of Governors, most of whom are chosen by the governor, removed dozens of courses from state universities’ core curriculum to comply with the Stop WOKE Act, a state law that took effect in 2022. The law, which DeSantis heavily promoted, discourages the teaching of concepts such as systemic racism or sexism. The courses removed from Florida’s 12 state universities were primarily sociology, anthropology and history courses.

    “You can’t erase history,” said Meadow Swantic, a criminal justice major at Florida Atlantic University, a public institution, in an interview at its Boca Raton campus. “There’s certain things that are built on white supremacy, and it’s a problem.”

    Fellow Florida Atlantic student Kayla Collins, however, said she has noticed some professors’ liberal bias during class discussions.

    “I myself have witnessed it in my history class,” said Collins, who identifies as Republican. “It was a great history class, but I would say there were a lot of political things brought up, when it wasn’t a government class or a political science class.” 

    At the University of Central Florida in Orlando, political science major Liliana Hogan said she had a different experience of her professors’ political leanings.

    “You hear ‘people go to university to get woke’ or whatever, but actually, as a poli-sci student, a lot of my professors are more right-wing than you would believe,” Hogan said. “I get more right-leaning perspectives from my teachers than I would have expected.” Hogan said.   

    Another UCF student, Johanna Abrams, objected to university budget cuts being ordered by the state government. Abrams said she understands that tax dollars are limited, but she believes college leaders should be trusted with making the budget decisions that best serve the student body.

    “The government’s job should be providing the funding for education, but not determining what is worthy of being taught,” Abrams said. 

    Related: Inside Florida’s ‘underground lab’ for far-right education policies

    Whatever their missions and attempts at mimicry, state-level DOGE entities are not necessarily identical to the federal version.

    For instance, in Kansas, the Committee on Government Efficiency, while inspired by DOGE, is in search of ideas from state residents about ways to make the state bureaucracy run better rather than imposing its own changes. A Missouri Senate portal inspired by the federal DOGE works in a similar way. Yet the federal namesake isn’t taking suggestions from the masses to inform its work.  

    And at the federal level, then-DOGE chief Elon Musk in February emailed workers, asking them to respond “to understand what they got done last week,” he posted on X. “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” Employees were asked to reply with a list of five accomplishments.

    The Ohio DOGE Caucus noted explicitly it won’t be doing anything like that.

    “We’re not going to be emailing any state employees asking them to give us five things they worked on throughout the week,” Ohio state Rep. Tex Fischer, a Republican, told a local radio station. “We’re really just trying to get like-minded people into a room to talk about making sure that government is spending our money wisely and focusing on its core functions that we all agree with.”

    Contact editor Nirvi Shah at 212-678-3445, securely on Signal at NirviShah.14 or via email at shah@hechingerreport.org.

    This story about DOGE cuts was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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  • Florida’s Own DOGE Is Reviewing Faculty Research, Grants

    Florida’s Own DOGE Is Reviewing Faculty Research, Grants

    Elon Musk’s days with DOGE appear numbered—the unelected billionaire bureaucrat said Tuesday that his time spent leading the agency-gutting U.S. Department of Government Efficiency will “drop significantly” next month. As Tesla’s profits plummet, the world’s richest man faces opposition from both Trump administration officials and voters.

    DOGE’s legacy remains unclear. Lawsuits are challenging its attempted cuts, including at the U.S. Education Department. Musk seems to have scaled back his planned overall budget savings from $1 or $2 trillion to $150 billion, and it’s unclear whether DOGE will achieve even that.

    But something may outlive Musk’s DOGE: all the state iterations it has inspired, with legislators and governors borrowing or riffing off the name. Iowa’s Republican governor created the Iowa DOGE Task Force. Missouri’s GOP-controlled Legislature launched Government Efficiency Committees, calling them MODOGE on Musk’s X social media platform. Kansas lost the reference to the original doge meme when it went with COGE, for its Senate Committee on Government Efficiency.

    But, as with the federal version, the jokey names for these state offshoots may belie the serious impact they could have on governments and public employees—including state higher education institutions and faculty.

    To take perhaps the most glaring example, the sweeping requests from the Florida DOGE team, which is led by a former federal Department of Transportation inspector general, have alarmed scholars.

    Earlier this month, the Florida DOGE asked public college and university presidents to provide an account—by the end of last week—of “all research published by staff” over the last six years, including “Papers and drafts made available to the public or in online academic repositories for drafts, preprints, or similar materials.”

    “If not contained therein, author’s name, title, and position at the institution” must be provided, according to the letters the presidents received. The letters didn’t say what this and other requests were for.

    The Florida DOGE also requested information on all grants awarded to institutions over the last six years, asking for each institution’s policy on allocating grants “for purposes of indirect cost recovery, including procedures for calculation.” Further, it requested an account of “all filled and vacant positions held by any employee with a non-instructional role.”

    By the end of April, Florida’s public institutions must also provide the “Length of research associated” with each research publication, funding sources associated with the research and any “publications about the research” from the researcher or institution. In addition, the state DOGE is requesting funding sources for each institution’s noninstructional positions and the names of the nonstudent employees administering the grants.

    And that may not be the end of the DOGE demands. In a March 26 letter, the state DOGE team told college presidents that it will conduct site visits “to ensure full compliance” with the governor’s executive order that created it, “as well as existing Florida law.” It said it may in the future request various other information, including course descriptions, syllabi, “full detail” on campus centers and the required end of diversity, equity and inclusion activities.

    The requests so far from the Florida DOGE are the latest in a string of state actions that faculty say threaten to infringe on, or have already reduced, academic freedom. Dan Saunders, lead negotiator for the United Faculty of Florida union at Florida International University and a tenured associate professor of higher education, expressed concerns about what he called a “continuation of a chilling effect on faculty in terms of what we research and publish.”

    “The lack of any meaningful articulation as to why they’re looking for this data and what they’re going to do with it just adds to the suspicions that I think the state has earned from the faculty,” Saunders said. “It’s clear that this is part of a broader and multidimensional attack” on areas of scholarship such as women’s and gender studies—part of a “comprehensive assault” on the “independence of the university,” he said.

    “If Florida DOGE is following the patterns of the federal DOGE, then I think we can expect some radical oversimplifications of nuanced data and some cherry picking” of texts that an “unsophisticated AI will highlight,” he said. Noting how much research is published over six years, he questioned “how anyone is supposed to engage meaningfully” with that much information.

    David Simmons, president of the University of South Florida’s Faculty Senate and a tenured engineering professor, said many faculty are “reasonably” concerned that this request is part of an effort to target “certain ideas that are disfavored by certain politicians.” Simmons—who stressed that he’s not speaking on behalf of the Senate or his institution—said such targeting would be “fundamentally un-American and inconsistent with the mission of a public university.”

    “We hope that’s not happening. We hope this is just an inefficient effort to collect data,” Simmons said. He noted that much of the research information that the Florida DOGE is requesting is already publicly available on Google Scholar, an online database with profiles on faculty across the country.

    “Universities are being required to reproduce information that’s already freely available in some cases, and to do that they’re using considerable resources and manpower,” Simmons said. The initial two-week data request was “so large as to be nearly impossible” to fulfill, he added.

    A State University System of Florida spokesperson deferred comment to the DOGE team, which didn’t respond to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for an interview or provide answers to written questions Thursday. A spokesperson for the Florida Department of Education, which includes the Florida College System, deferred comment to Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s office, which responded via email but didn’t answer multiple written questions.

    “In alignment with previous announcements and correspondence with all 67 counties, 411 municipalities, and 40 academic institutions the Florida DOGE Task Force aims to eliminate wasteful spending and cut government bloat,” a DeSantis spokesperson wrote. “If waste or abuse is identified during our collaborative efforts with partnering agencies and institutions, each case will be handled accordingly.”

    ‘DOGE Before DOGE Was Cool’

    When Donald Trump returned to the White House in January and announced DOGE’s creation, he suggested it was an effort to cut the alleged waste his Democratic predecessor had allowed to fester. But DeSantis—who lost to Trump in the GOP presidential primary—launched his own DOGE in a state that he’s been leading for six years.

    “Florida was DOGE before DOGE was cool,” DeSantis posted on X Feb. 24. (His actions in higher education have, in many ways, presaged what Trump is now doing nationally.)

    So, perhaps not surprisingly, DeSantis’s executive order creating the Florida DOGE that day began by saying the state already has a “strong record of responsible fiscal management.” A list of rosy financial stats followed before DeSantis finally wrote, “Notwithstanding Florida’s history of prudent fiscal management relative to many states in the country, the State should nevertheless endeavor to explore opportunities for even better stewardship.”

    “The State of Florida should leverage cutting edge technology to identify further spending reductions and reforms in state agencies, university bureaucracies, and local governments,” DeSantis wrote, echoing, at least in language, the tech-focused approach of the federal DOGE.

    He established the DOGE team within the Executive Office of the Governor, tasking it in part to work with the statewide higher education agencies to “identify and eliminate unnecessary spending, programs, courses, staff, and any other inefficiencies,” including “identifying and returning unnecessary federal grant funding.” The executive order says state agencies must set up their own DOGE teams, which will identify grants “that are inconsistent with the policies of this State and should be returned to the American taxpayer in furtherance of the President’s DOGE efforts.”

    This executive order expires about a year from now. In an emailed statement, Teresa M. Hodge, the statewide United Faculty of Florida union president, said the request for faculty publication records “is not about transparency or accountability; it is about control.”

    “Our members should not be forced to defend their scholarship, or their silence, in a political witch hunt,” Hodge said. “We stand united in ensuring that Florida’s faculty are free to teach, conduct research, and to speak without fear of retaliation.”

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  • Watch DOGE layoffs in real-time with Layoffs.fyi

    Watch DOGE layoffs in real-time with Layoffs.fyi

    Layoffs.fyi is keeping track of US federal government layoffs. The website was originally created to track tech layoffs and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and NY Times. 

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  • DOGE Education Cuts Hit Students with Disabilities, Literacy Research – The 74

    DOGE Education Cuts Hit Students with Disabilities, Literacy Research – The 74


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    When teens and young adults with disabilities in California’s Poway Unified School District heard about a new opportunity to get extra help planning for life after high school, nearly every eligible student signed up.

    The program, known as Charting My Path for Future Success, aimed to fill a major gap in education research about what kinds of support give students nearing graduation the best shot at living independently, finding work, or continuing their studies.

    Students with disabilities finish college at much lower rates than their non-disabled peers, and often struggle to tap into state employment programs for adults with disabilities, said Stacey McCrath-Smith, a director of special education at Poway Unified, which had 135 students participating in the program. So the extra help, which included learning how to track goals on a tool designed for high schoolers with disabilities, was much needed.

    Charting My Path launched earlier this school year in Poway Unified and 12 other school districts. The salaries of 61 school staff nationwide, and the training they received to work with nearly 1,100 high schoolers with disabilities for a year and a half, was paid for by the U.S. Department of Education.

    Jessie Damroth’s 17-year-old son Logan, who has autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and other medical needs, had attended classes and met with his mentor through the program at Newton Public Schools in Massachusetts for a month. For the first time, he was talking excitedly about career options in science and what he might study at college.

    “He was starting to talk about what his path would look like,” Damroth said. “It was exciting to hear him get really excited about these opportunities. … He needed that extra support to really reinforce that he could do this.”

    Then the Trump administration pulled the plug.

    Charting My Path was among more than 200 Education Department contracts and grants terminated over the last two weeks by the Trump administration’s U.S. DOGE Service. DOGE has slashed spending it deemed to be wasteful, fraudulent, or in service of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility goals that President Donald Trump has sought to ban. But in several instances, the decision to cancel contracts affected more than researchers analyzing data in their offices — it affected students.

    Many projects, like Charting My Path, involved training teachers in new methods, testing learning materials in actual classrooms, and helping school systems use data more effectively.

    “Students were going to learn really how to set goals and track progress themselves, rather than having it be done for them,” McCrath-Smith said. “That is the skill that they will need post-high school when there’s not a teacher around.”

    All of that work was abruptly halted — in some cases with nearly finished results that now cannot be distributed.

    Every administration is entitled to set its own priorities, and contracts can be canceled or changed, said Steven Fleischman, an education consultant who for many years ran one of the regional research programs that was terminated. He compared it to a homeowner deciding they no longer want a deck as part of their remodel.

    But the current approach reminds him more of construction projects started and then abandoned during the Great Recession, in some cases leaving giant holes that sat for years.

    “You can walk around and say, ‘Oh, that was a building we never finished because the funds got cut off,’” he said.

    DOGE drives cuts to education research contracts, grants

    The Education Department has been a prime target of DOGE, the chaotic cost-cutting initiative led by billionaire Elon Musk, now a senior adviser to Trump.

    So far, DOGE has halted 89 education projects, many of which were under the purview of the Institute of Education Sciences, the ostensibly independent research arm of the Education Department. The administration said those cuts, which included multi-year contracts, totaled $881 million. In recent years, the federal government has spent just over $800 million on the entire IES budget.

    DOGE has also shut down 10 regional labs that conduct research for states and local schools and shuttered four equity assistance centers that help with teacher training. The Trump administration also cut off funding for nearly 100 teacher training grants and 18 grants for centers that often work to improve instruction for struggling students.

    The total savings is up for debate. The Trump administration said the terminated Education Department contracts and grants were worth $2 billion. But some were near completion with most of the money already spent.

    An NPR analysis of all of DOGE’s reported savings found that it likely was around $2 billion for the entire federal government — though the Education Department is a top contributor.

    On Friday, a federal judge issued an injunction that temporarily blocks the Trump administration from canceling additional contracts and grants that might violate the anti-DEIA executive order. It’s not clear whether the injunction would prevent more contracts from being canceled “for convenience.”

    Mark Schneider, the recent past IES director, said the sweeping cuts represent an opportunity to overhaul a bloated education research establishment. But even many conservative critics have expressed alarm at how wide-ranging and indiscriminate the cuts have been. Congress mandated many of the terminated programs, which also indirectly support state and privately funded research.

    The canceled projects include contracts that support maintenance of the Common Core of Data, a major database used by policymakers, researchers, and journalists, as well as work that supports updates to the What Works Clearinghouse, a huge repository of evidence-based practices available to educators for free.

    And after promising not to make any cuts to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation’s report card, the department canceled an upcoming test for 17-year-olds that helps researchers understand long-term trends. On Monday, Peggy Carr, the head of the National Center for Education Statistics, which oversees NAEP, was placed on leave.

    The Education Department did not respond to questions about who decided which programs to cut and what criteria were used. Nor did the department respond to a specific question about why Charting My Path was eliminated. DOGE records estimate the administration saved $22 million by terminating the program early, less than half the $54 million in the original contract.

    The decision has caused mid-year disruptions and uncertainty.

    In Utah, the Canyons School District is trying to reassign the school counselor and three teachers whose salaries were covered by the Charting My Path contract.

    The district, which had 88 high schoolers participating in the program, is hoping to keep using the curriculum to boost its usual services, said Kirsten Stewart, a district spokesperson.

    Officials in Poway Unified, too, hope schools can use the curriculum and tools to keep up a version of the program. But that will take time and work because the program’s four teachers had to be reassigned to other jobs.

    “They dedicated that time and got really important training,” McCrath-Smith said. “We don’t want to see that squandered.”

    For Damroth, the loss of parent support meetings through Charting My Path was especially devastating. Logan has a rare genetic mutation that causes him to fall asleep easily during the day, so Damroth wanted help navigating which colleges might be able to offer extra scheduling support.

    “I have a million questions about this. Instead of just hearing ‘I don’t know’ I was really looking forward to working with Joe and the program,” she said, referring to Logan’s former mentor. “It’s just heartbreaking. I feel like this wasn’t well thought out. … My child wants to do things in life, but he needs to be given the tools to achieve those goals and those dreams that he has.”

    DOGE cuts labs that helped ‘Mississippi Miracle’ in reading

    The dramatic improvement in reading proficiency that Carey Wright oversaw as state superintendent in one the nation’s poorest states became known as the “Mississippi Miracle.”

    Regional Educational Laboratory Southeast, based out of the Florida Center for Reading Research at Florida State University, was a key partner in that work, Wright said.

    When Wright wondered if state-funded instructional coaches were really making a difference, REL Southeast dispatched a team to observe, videotape, and analyze the instruction delivered by hundreds of elementary teachers across the state. Researchers reported that teachers’ instructional practices aligned well with the science of reading and that teachers themselves said they felt far more knowledgeable about teaching reading.

    “That solidified for me that the money that we were putting into professional learning was working,” Wright said.

    The study, she noted, arose from a casual conversation with researchers at REL Southeast: “That’s the kind of give and take that the RELs had with the states.”

    Wright, now Maryland state superintendent, said she was looking forward to partnering with REL Mid-Atlantic on a math initiative and on an overhaul of the school accountability system.

    But this month, termination letters went out to the universities and research organizations that run the 10 Regional Educational Laboratories, which were established by Congress in 1965 to serve states and school districts. The letters said the contracts were being terminated “for convenience.”

    The press release that went to news organizations cited “wasteful and ideologically driven spending” and named a single project in Ohio that involved equity audits as a part of an effort to reduce suspensions. Most of the REL projects on the IES website involve reading, math, career connections, and teacher retention.

    Jannelle Kubinec, CEO of WestEd, an education research organization that held the contracts for REL West and REL Northwest, said she never received a complaint or a request to review the contracts before receiving termination letters. Her team had to abruptly cancel meetings to go over results with school districts. In other cases, reports are nearly finished but cannot be distributed because they haven’t gone through the review process.

    REL West was also working with the Utah State Board of Education to figure out if the legislature’s investment in programs to keep early career teachers from leaving the classroom was making a difference, among several other projects.

    “This is good work and we are trying to think through our options,” she said. “But the cancellation does limit our ability to finish the work.”

    Given enough time, Utah should be able to find a staffer to analyze the data collected by REL West, said Sharon Turner, a spokesperson for the Utah State Board of Education. But the findings are much less likely to be shared with other states.

    The most recent contracts started in 2022 and were set to run through 2027.

    The Trump administration said it planned to enter into new contracts for the RELs to satisfy “statutory requirements” and better serve schools and states, though it’s unclear what that will entail.

    “The states drive the research agendas of the RELs,” said Sara Schapiro, the executive director of the Alliance for Learning Innovation, a coalition that advocates for more effective education research. If the federal government dictates what RELs can do, “it runs counter to the whole argument that they want the states to be leading the way on education.”

    Some terminated federal education research was nearly complete

    Some research efforts were nearly complete when they got shut down, raising questions about how efficient these cuts were.

    The American Institutes for Research, for example, was almost done evaluating the impact of the Comprehensive Literacy State Development program, which aims to improve literacy instruction through investments like new curriculum and teacher training.

    AIR’s research spanned 114 elementary schools across 11 states and involved more than 23,000 third, fourth, and fifth graders and their nearly 900 reading teachers.

    Researchers had collected and analyzed a massive trove of data from the randomized trial and presented their findings to federal education officials just three days before the study was terminated.

    “It was a very exciting meeting,” said Mike Garet, a vice president and institute fellow at AIR who oversaw the study. “People were very enthusiastic about the report.”

    Another AIR study that was nearing completion looked at the use of multi-tiered systems of support for reading among first and second graders. It’s a strategy that helps schools identify and provide support to struggling readers, with the most intensive help going to kids with the highest needs. It’s widely used by schools, but its effectiveness hasn’t been tested on a larger scale.

    The research took place in 106 schools and involved over 1,200 educators and 5,700 children who started first grade in 2021 and 2022. Much of the funding for the study went toward paying for teacher training and coaching to roll out the program over three years. All of the data was collected and nearly done being analyzed when DOGE made its cuts.

    Garet doesn’t think he and his team should simply walk away from unfinished work.

    “If we can’t report results, that would violate our covenant with the districts, the teachers, the parents, and the students who devoted a lot of time in the hope of generating knowledge about what works,” Garet said. “Now that we have the data and have the results, I think we’re duty-bound to report them.”

    This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.


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  • DOGE fails to accurately disclose contract and program cuts

    DOGE fails to accurately disclose contract and program cuts

    As part of his administration’s broad push for government transparency, on Feb. 18 President Donald Trump ordered all federal agencies to publicize “to the maximum extent permitted by law” the complete details of every program, contract or grant they terminated.

    “The American people have seen their tax dollars used to fund the passion projects of unelected bureaucrats rather than to advance the national interest,” Trump wrote in the memo, tilted “Radical Transparency About Wasteful Spending.” “[They] have a right to see how the Federal Government has wasted their hard-earned wages.”

    Immediately after receiving a copy of the order, Inside Higher Ed reached out to the Department of Education and requested a comprehensive list of any and all such cuts, as well as explanations for why each contract was terminated. But two weeks later, the Education Department has yet to respond, and neither the department nor the staff it has partnered with from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have publicly released any more information about the terminated contracts and grants.

    In fact, DOGE—the agency leading the crusade of cuts—has continuously made edits to the “Wall of Receipts,” where it was supposedly outlining the cuts that have been made. Late Sunday night, the group deleted hundreds of contracts it had previously claimed to cancel, The New York Times first reported and Inside Higher Ed confirmed.

    “It’s absolutely hypocrisy,” said Antoinette Flores, director of higher education accountability and quality at New America, a left-leaning think tank. “It feels like we’re all being gaslit. I don’t know why they are saying they want to be transparent without being transparent.”

    For weeks, higher education leaders, policy experts and advocates have raised concerns as the department terminated more than 100 assorted grants and research contracts. Combined, the cuts are purportedly valued at nearly $1.9 billion, according to the department, and will affect a swath of institutions, including the department’s largest research arm as well as regional labs and external nonprofits that collaborated with local officials to improve learner outcomes. Combined, the cuts will dramatically impact the data available to researchers and policymakers focused on improving teaching and learning strategies, experts say.

    Education scholars are worried that the cuts will leave state officials and college administrators with little evidence on which to base their strategies for student success and academic return on investment. One professor went as far as to say that the cuts are “an assault on the U.S.’s education data infrastructure.”

    And though the Trump administration has flaunted its transparency and glorified DOGE’s website as a prime example of their success in providing public records, policy experts on both sides of the political aisle say the collective contract value displayed is an overestimate. Calculating savings is more nuanced than just listing a contract’s maximum potential value, they say—and even if they saved money, some of the terminated programs were congressionally mandated.

    Over all, the sudden nature of the cuts, combined with the questionable accuracy of reported savings and a lack of further transparency, have left higher education advocacy groups deeply concerned.

    “The cuts that happened recently are going to have far-reaching impacts, and those impacts could really be long term unless some rapid action is taken,” said Mamie Voight, president of the Institute for Higher Education Policy, a national nonprofit that campaigns for college access and student success. “This information is useful and essential to help policymakers steward taxpayer dollars responsibly.”

    “To eliminate data, evidence and research is working in opposition to efficiency,” she later added.

    The department did not respond to requests for comment on Voight’s and Flores’s criticisms.

    A Data ‘Mismatch’

    For many in higher ed, the executive actions Trump has taken since January raise questions about executive overreach and government transparency. But Nat Malkus, deputy director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, said, “It’s not a matter of deception” or even simply a question of transparency.

    Instead, he said, “The question is, what’s the quality of the transparency? And what can we make of it?”

    In a recent analysis, titled “Running Down DOGE’s Department of Education Receipts,” Malkus compared a leaked list of the 89 terminated Institute of Education Sciences contracts, along with detailed data from USASpending.gov, to those DOGE had posted on its website. He said he found major inconsistencies, or a “mismatch” in how they defined the purported contract value.

    He also noted that though the “Wall of Receipts” has two separate tabs, one listing a contract’s value and another listing its savings, it displays the overall contract value first. The agency also declines to explain the difference between value and savings or how it calculates either.

    As is the case with contract values, DOGE has been inconsistent in how it calculates savings. But what the agency most often displays to the public is how much a contract could theoretically cost if all options and add-ons are utilized—known as the potential total—minus the amount the government had currently agreed to spend by the end of the contract, or the total obligation. So in other words, Malkus said, DOGE is sharing how much the government could save if it were to continue the contract and receive the promised deliverables without adding any extra bells and whistles.

    But that’s not what DOGE has done. Instead, it has terminated the contracts, and the Education Department won’t receive the final product it was paying for.

    To best represent savings in that scenario, Malkus said, DOGE would calculate the difference between how much the government had agreed to spend by the end of the contract—the total obligation—and how much the government has already spent, or the total outlay.

    “It’s weird because DOGE is publishing one set of savings that I don’t think actually makes sense to anybody, and they’re ignoring savings that they actually are conceivably getting,” Malkus said. “There are some good reasons that they might choose to do that. But DOGE would do well to explain what these dollars are, because right now, no one can tell.”

    Malkus first spoke with Inside Higher Ed on Friday. But since then, the DOGE database has changed. Malkus said Tuesday that some of the initial trends in the way DOGE appeared to be calculating savings are no longer present and he has yet to find a new, even semiconsistent formula for how DOGE is calculating savings.

    “The pace of change on DOGE’s numbers is dizzying even for someone like me who works at analyzing these receipts,” Malkus said. “Each week there have been changes to the number of contracts and within contracts the values and savings that DOGE is publishing. It’s hard to know if they are trying to get this right, because it’s impossible to find a consistent trail.”

    I don’t attribute it to a desire to falsely advertise transparency and not deliver on it. I just think they need to do a much better job in the execution.”

    —Nat Malkus

    And even if there were a consistent, uniform formula for how DOGE officials are calculating efficiency, in some cases they still choose to highlight overall contract value rather than the direct savings. For example, a DOGE social media post about the Institute of Education Sciences cuts noted the contracts were worth $881 million in total.

    “So are the actual savings equal to that implied? No, they are not,” Malkus said. “They are far, far less than that amount, somewhere around 25 percent of the total.”

    The agency’s website doesn’t detail the team’s methodology or offer any explanation about why the cuts were made. Malkus believes this lack of clarification reflects the Trump administration’s effort to make notable cuts quickly. He added that while he doesn’t agree with every cut made, he understands and supports the “aggressiveness” of Trump and Musk’s approach.

    “If they don’t move quickly, then there’s commissions, and then you have to go to the secretary, and they have interminable meetings and everything gets slowed down,” he said. “So one of their priorities is to move fast, and they don’t mind breaking things in the process.”

    From Malkus’s perspective, the inconsistencies in how each cut is documented, the many edits that have been made to the DOGE database and the lack of explanation for each cut isn’t a matter of “malice or dishonesty,” but rather “mistakes.”

    “I don’t think their savings are a clear estimation of what taxpayers are actually saving. But I don’t attribute it to a desire to falsely advertise transparency and not deliver on it. I just think they need to do a much better job in the execution,” he said.

    A ‘Disregard for the Law’

    Flores from New America conducted similar research and, like Malkus, found that the DOGE data doesn’t add up and exaggerates the savings. However, she had different views on the cause and effects of the agency’s aggressive, mistake-riddled approach.

    “It’s like taking a wrecking ball to important government services,” she said. “If you’re trying to be efficient, you should take into consideration how far along is a contract? How much have we spent on this? Are we getting anything for the investment we’ve made?”

    The Trump administration has broadly explained its cuts as a response to the “liberal ideology” of diversity, equity and inclusion and an effort to increase efficiency. But to Flores, they target anything but “waste, fraud and abuse.”

    “The reason why the Trump administration says it wants to eliminate the Department of Education is because you don’t see improvement in student performance,” she said. “But if you want to improve student performance, you need to understand what is happening on the ground with students and evidence-based research on how to help students improve.”

    And many of the studies affected by the contract cuts were nearly completed, she said. They were projects on which the agency had already spent hundreds of millions of dollars. So by cutting them now, the department loses the data and wastes taxpayer funds.

    It’s absolutely hypocrisy. It feels like we’re all being gaslit.”

    —Antoinette Flores

    “I’ve talked to some researchers who worked at one of the organizations that had their contracts cut, and they said all work has to stop,” she said. “No matter how close it was to being finished, it just has to stop.”

    Flores also noted that some of the studies terminated via contract cuts—particularly the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study—are congressionally mandated, so ending them is unconstitutional.

    “The people making these cuts don’t necessarily understand the math. They don’t necessarily understand the contracts or the purpose of them, and there’s a disregard for the law,” she said.

    Voight from IHEP agreed, describing projects like NPSAS as “core data sets that the field relies upon.”

    “Lawmakers often turn to these types of longitudinal and sample studies to answer questions that they have as they’re trying to build policies. And states turn to this type of information to help them benchmark how they’re faring against national numbers,” she said. “So these studies themselves are a really, really devastating loss.”

    Even some contracts that weren’t cut will suffer consequences, Voight noted. For example, though the Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems grant program has so far been shielded from outright termination, she said, it didn’t come away entirely unscathed. The data systems rely on key information from a program called Common Education Data Standards, which was slashed; without CEDS, the grant program won’t be nearly as effective.

    “The cuts have actually been misunderstanding the interrelationships between many of these different products,” Voight said.

    Over all, she believes the Department of Education, and specifically IES, are not the best places for efficiency cuts. The $807.6 million budget for the Institute of Education Sciences in fiscal year 2024 is just “a drop in the bucket” compared with the amount spent on other research and development groups, like the $4.1 billion given to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency the same year.

    “To think about how to build efficiencies is certainly not a bad question to ask. But IES is already such a lean operation, and the way that they are trying to build evidence is critical,” she said. “So we should really be focusing on investment in our education research infrastructure and taking a strategic approach to any changes that are going to be made.”

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  • New research questions DOGE claims about ED cut savings

    New research questions DOGE claims about ED cut savings

    New research suggests that the Department of Government Efficiency has been making inaccurate claims about the extent of its savings from cuts to the Department of Education.

    DOGE previously posted on X that it ended 89 contracts from the Education Department’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences, worth $881 million. But an analysis released Wednesday by the left-wing think tank New America found that these contracts were worth about $676 million—roughly $200 million less than DOGE claimed. DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” website, where it tracks its cuts, later suggested the savings from 104 Education Department contracts came out to a more modest $500 million.

    New America also asserted that DOGE is losing money, given that the government had already spent almost $400 million on the now-terminated Institute of Education Sciences contracts, meaning those funds have gone to waste.

    “Research cannot be undone, and statistics cannot be uncollected. Instead, they will likely sit on a computer somewhere untouched,” New America researchers wrote in a blog post about their findings.

    In a separate analysis shared last week, the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, also called into question DOGE’s claims about its Education Department cuts.

    Nat Malkus, senior fellow and deputy director of education policy studies at AEI, compared DOGE’s contract values with the department’s listed values and found they “seldom matched” and DOGE’s values were “always higher,” among other problems with DOGE’s data.

    “DOGE has an unprecedented opportunity to cut waste and bloat,” Malkus said in a post about his research. “However, the sloppy work shown so far should give pause to even its most sympathetic defenders.”

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  • Jon Stewart Reworks Trump & Elon’s Sweeping DOGE Budget Cuts (The Daily Show)

    Jon Stewart Reworks Trump & Elon’s Sweeping DOGE Budget Cuts (The Daily Show)







    Higher Education Inquirer : Jon Stewart Reworks Trump & Elon’s Sweeping DOGE Budget Cuts (The Daily Show)




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