Social media critics hammered the so-called Department of Government Efficiency task force on Friday over a recent round of cuts to nearly 100 contracts worth nearly $900 million at the Institute for Education Sciences in the Department of Education.
The Trump administration canceled the contracts Monday, a significant blow to the department, which houses the National Center for Education Statistics, funds research on how to improve higher education and provides publicly accessible data on postsecondary institutions, according to InsideHigherEd.
Stuart Buck, executive director at Good Science Project and a senior advisor at the Social Science Research Council, took to Elon Musk's X platform this week to assess the scale of the damage.
"Penny-wise but pound-foolish. They have unwittingly canceled some of the best education research out there, along with major national surveys and tests that are crucial to tracking America’s educational performance," he lamented.
Buck, who has a PhD in education policy, said much of what Musk's DOGE canceled was not "waste or abuse" — but rather "high-quality research projects" that were underway for years. Canceling them mid-way, he said, is "far more wasteful than letting them finish."
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Buck provided several examples of studies DOGE canceled, including an impact evaluation of reading programs in early elementary school, a contract to a research firm to assess a decade-long voucher program in Washington, D.C., and a contract to a research firm looking into whether community learning centers that provided after-school programs in low-income schools helped curb drug abuse and violence.
But it was his fourth example that garnered fierce backlash on social media.
"The DOGE team unwittingly canceled some of the most famous, long-running, and useful studies in all of education research," wrote Buck. "This is truly disheartening."
This included the High School and Beyond Longitudinal Study; the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2022-23; Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2023; and The School Survey on Crime and Safety.
"If there’s anything the federal government can do well, it is to collect national statistics on how we’re doing as a nation. DOGE is trying to cancel many such efforts for no apparent reason," he said.
"This seems bad @stuartbuck1," replied Jason Crawford, founder of the Roots of Progress Institute.
"Utter vandalism," former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan remarked on X.
"This is absolutely ridiculous," replied Adam Ozimek, chief economist at Economic Innovation Group. "And it is what happens when you judge a program in 15 seconds with zero content knowledge based on a description in a single database. This is not government reform."
Ozimek added in a separate post: "What is the cost of letting large numbers of people in the conservative movement be red-pilled into thinking that the government only gets in the way and provides no useful functions? We are living it. Those who know better, speak up."
