Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency slashed millions in contracts and grants at the Education Department.
During the first two months of the second Trump administration, the Education Department slashed $1.3 billion in contracts and terminated $504 million in grants, according to a new report from the agency’s inspector general.
The 91-page report, released Tuesday, provides a more complete accounting of how the billions in federal spending cuts made by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency played out at the Education Department from Jan. 20 to March 31, 2025.
“I fought for this report because Americans deserve to know what Donald Trump is doing to gut education in this country,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in a statement to Inside Higher Ed .
Getting clear answers about how many contracts or grants were terminated—and the money saved—was difficult, especially as the public dashboard tracking the DOGE cuts changed often and was frequently inaccurate . Several researchers and reporters have since sought to calculate how much DOGE saved or to document the scale of the cuts, but this report offers a more official tally, including more details about the nearly 1,600 staffers who either took a buyout or were laid off. For instance, about 30 percent of those employees had between 11 and 21 years of service, and about half of those who had 31 to 50 years of service were separated from the department.
But the inspector general report said it had to approximate some of the staffing figures because ED didn’t “provide all requested information, or permit unfettered access to department staff.” ED countered that it cooperated in good faith but was limited by litigation over the layoffs. The department insisted that the lawyers from the Office of the General Counsel sit in on any interviews between OIG and ED employees, breaking with a long-standing practice.
Rachel Gittleman, president of the union representing ED employees, said in a statement that the report confirms that “the Trump Administration has been systematically destroying the Education Department.”
“And now the agency’s own Inspector General gives the public the fullest picture to date of the devastation Education Secretary Linda McMahon has wrought: the massive staff cuts, the programmatic eliminations, the billions in grant funding slashed from programs that serve students, families and teachers across the country,” she added.
Ellen Keast, a department spokesperson, criticized the report in a statement.
“The entire purpose of this ‘report’ was to review changes to staffing, but they stopped their ‘analysis’ just two weeks after the RIF,” Keast said. “It doesn’t even accurately account for the fact that a court ordered OCR employees back to work in December 2025. These and other deficiencies were brought to the OIG’s attention numerous times throughout their inquiry. If anything, this ‘report’ demonstrates how effective the Trump Administration is. With nearly half the staff, ED has effectively implemented some of the most sweeping higher education reforms in decades while returning education to the states.”
More Details About IES Cuts
As expected, the inspector general found that the Education Department’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences, bore the brunt of the contract cuts. According to the OIG report, 97 IES contracts totaling $1.1 billion were canceled—the most of any ED office. Those contracts all related to educational studies, some of which are statutorily required. Only one was reversed. IES did award 45 new contracts, totaling $91.3 million, for National Assessment of Educational Progress state coordinators.
The research agency was nearly gutted by layoffs and voluntary buyouts in February and March 2025, the report notes—IES had 191 employees before Trump took office, but was down to just 30 by March 31. Those layoffs left several IES suboffices without any employees to perform “congressionally mandated collection, analysis, and reporting of statistics on the condition of American education” or provide training to states, school districts and institutions of higher education, according to the report.
The Education Department disputed that assessment, arguing to the inspector general that other offices were still carrying out statutory responsibilities. (For each office within ED, the report breaks down some statutory or oversight functions that were performed by suboffices that had no remaining employees after the layoffs and buyouts.)
“The draft suggests or could imply to a reader that certain statutory responsibilities may no longer be executed due to the reduction in force; that characterization risks confusing the public and stakeholders and is inconsistent with ED’s continued discharge of those responsibilities for more than a year since the RIF,” department officials wrote to the inspector general’s office.
The inspector general responded that it didn’t change its draft because “no corroborating evidence has been provided to support the Department’s assertion that it has continued to discharge those responsibilities since the RIF.”
ED officials have said they want to re-envision IES and have begun hiring for some positions. In March, the department released recommendations for reimagining the agency.
Erin Dunlop Velez, vice president of research at the Institute for Higher Education Policy, said in a statement to Inside Higher Ed that the report reveals “an alarming and systematic gutting of the federal infrastructure that ensures informed decision-making and transparency in our country’s higher education system.”
“Leaving an agency tasked with Congressionally mandated, objective statistical analysis with a mere 16 percent of its staff severely threatens our collective ability to understand and improve student outcomes,” Velez added. “The termination of $1.1 billion in critical education data and research contracts has been a damaging setback for evidence-based policymaking, as weakening our nation’s data infrastructure creates significant informational gaps.”