In education circles, the presumption was that I’d share this outrage. I don’t, which has surprised a lot of people—probably because I’ve long argued that Washington has a vital role to play when it comes to education research and data. And while I’m troubled by Team DOGE’s chaotic execution, I do believe there’s much at IES that deserves to be cut or overhauled. Long experience has given me little cause to suspect that a more measured approach would yield any meaningful change.
So, I’m conflicted. Let me try to unpack this a bit.
First off, it’s good to recognize that Musk’s grip-it-and-rip-it DOGE team is operating pretty independently of the staff at the Department of Education. While the new team at the department features a lot of people with deep expertise in education programs, DOGE doesn’t. Thus far, their approach has basically been to cut as much as it can. Period. This has yielded a lot of indiscriminate activity.
Now, generally speaking, I’m no fan of blunderbuss policy or rash action. In the abstract, I agree with Adam Gamoran, Biden’s never-confirmed pick to head IES, who argued, “It would be one thing to say, all right, we’re going to undertake a careful process of examination to determine which of these contracts are really paying off. But to take a sledgehammer to the whole set of contracts is capricious.”
The problem? There’s little appetite for making measured, careful cuts. I’ve seen zero evidence that the education research community is willing to seriously assess the returns on those contracts or engage in a constructive discussion about cuts. Betsy DeVos’s tenure offers something of a case study. DeVos pursued deliberate rule-making, worked with Congress, and sought to address issues like the department’s collective-bargaining agreement incrementally. She proposed relatively modest spending cuts, but the results weren’t encouraging. DeVos was maligned in the press. She was undercut by leaks and resistance from hostile career staff. She was blocked and mocked at every turn by a web of K–12 and higher ed interest groups. She was subjected to vile calumny by education researchers. Later, DeVos’s successor Miguel Cardona didn’t even feign interest in weeding out wasteful activities.
Former IES director Mark Schneider has called for overhauling bureaucratic and wasteful routines that allow irrelevant activities to persist in perpetuity. He points out that he spent six years as head of IES trying unsuccessfully to make measured change without result under either Trump 1.0 or Biden. DOGE’s whirling blade, he argues, offers a sorely-needed opportunity to “clean out the attic.”
It’s worth appreciating the logic of DOGE. Its operating assumption is that traditional Republicans can’t make careful, deliberate cuts and that Democrats won’t even try. If officials try to move slowly and carefully, the thinking goes, nothing will get done. Thus, the only viable option is to move fast, break stuff, and slash away before recalcitrant staff and hostile interest groups bring things to a halt. It may not be an especially appealing strategy, but it’s a practical one.