Elon Musk’s cost-cutting effort announced a variety of cuts at the Education Department totaling over $900 million, apparently aimed at hobbling the department’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences.
The team Mr. Musk has assembled, which has operated in relative secrecy in shuttering other agencies such as U.S.A.I.D. and slashing government programs, said on social media on Monday that the Education Department had “terminated” 89 contracts, as well as 29 grants associated with diversity and equity training.
Most, if not all, of the contract cuts hit the Institute of Education Sciences’ portfolio, including Education Innovation and Research grants and review projects associated with the What Works Clearinghouse, which produces and curates research on best practices in education, according to three people familiar with the department’s contracting. The people requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal because they were not authorized to discuss the cuts.
Less than two weeks after the release of new federal testing data showing reading achievement at historic lows, the cuts were likely to hit research intended to answer questions about some of the biggest problems in American education since the Covid-19 pandemic, such as absenteeism and student behavioral challenges.
A spokesman for the Education Department, reached for comment, did not elaborate on the programs or grants it gave the order to suspend.
Appearing at a news conference alongside President Trump in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Mr. Musk criticized the federal bureaucracy as riddled with fraud and waste, without offering evidence. He defended his team’s work as radically transparent, even as Education Department staff members and contractors frantically raced to understand the scope of the cuts.
“We have this unelected, fourth unconstitutional branch of government, which is the bureaucracy, which has, in a lot of ways currently, more power than any elected representative,” Mr. Musk said. “And this is not something that people want, and it does not match the will of the people.”
Mr. Trump repeated his vows to scrutinize the Education Department, but did not address the changes.
Specifics about the extent of the cuts and the impact they would have were trickling out on Tuesday evening.
Dana Tofig, a spokesman for the American Institutes for Research, an independent nonprofit that often teams up with the federal government on education data, said the group had received termination notices for several major grants. Projects that lost funding included a large-scale effort to gather and analyze data on how American students perform academically relative to peers around the world; a data report on school safety; and an effort, which was supposed to continue through 2030, to understand what sorts of supports are most effective for disabled youths.
“The broader concern is about the role of evidence in improving teaching and learning and getting better outcomes for students,” Mr. Tofig said.
AEM Education Services, a vendor that collects data under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act for the department to analyze, also had its contract suspended, according to a department employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing for their job. The analysis that the company provides typically must be completed before the department doles out congressionally required awards, potentially hampering its ability to deliver special education grants to states on time this year.
Taken together, the reams of canceled contracts caused immediate alarm among researchers and lawmakers, who see the information assembled by the department’s research arm as an invaluable resource for educators working to improve teaching methods.
Cuts to the agency’s research grants are especially notable given that the federal government has taken a leadership role in collecting data on education — and highlighting best practices — since the 1860s, said Chester E. Finn Jr., who served under President Ronald Reagan as the Education Department’s assistant secretary for research and improvement.
Dr. Finn compared education research to medical research, pointing out that there is no equivalent to the role pharmaceutical companies play as a private sector funding source.
Education research, he said, “is arguably the oldest and most central function of the federal government in education.”
Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, denounced the cuts.
“An unelected billionaire is now bulldozing the research arm of the Department of Education — taking a wrecking ball to high-quality research and basic data we need to improve our public schools,” Ms. Murray said in a statement on Monday. “Cutting off these investments after the contract has already been inked is the definition of wasteful.”
Separately on Tuesday, a Federal District Court judge in Washington temporarily restricted members of Mr. Musk’s team from gaining access to more than a dozen systems that store sensitive data at the department until Monday.
Two legal groups representing the University of California Student Association had brought a lawsuit seeking to keep Mr. Musk’s associates from combing through the Education Department’s data because of privacy concerns related to the personal identifying information that students routinely disclose when applying for federal aid.
During a hearing on Tuesday morning, lawyers from the government appeared unable to speak to the extent to which Mr. Musk’s engineers and analysts had bored into the department’s databases. Both parties later agreed that the Musk team would refrain from entering the systems until Monday, giving the government more time to prepare its case.
The judge in the case, Randolph D. Moss, also expressed some doubt about whether lawyers representing the students could show that Mr. Musk’s team had harmed students by improperly gaining access to their data because it was unclear whether anyone on Mr. Musk’s team was operating as an employee of the department.
“Here you’re dealing with people who, at least apparently, in some form or another, are government employees, although I don’t really know that, and I don’t have an administrative record,” Judge Moss said.
Mr. Musk’s team, part of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, has been operating in the Education Department for more than a week. Team members were added to the agency’s staff directory and have been working from the top floor of its main building in Washington.
Mr. Trump’s appointees have told staff members at the Education Department that Mr. Musk’s team will scrutinize the agency’s budget and operations. They warned various offices in the Education Department to expect some upheaval in connection to the review, according to recordings obtained by The New York Times.
“DOGE employees have no legitimate need for students and their families’ personal information,” Adam Pulver, a lawyer for Public Citizen Litigation Group, which helped bring the lawsuit, said in a statement. “The Department of Education’s attempts to evade federal privacy laws must be stopped.”
A lawyer for the Justice Department said on Tuesday that the team litigating the matter had not been briefed on whether members of Mr. Musk’s team had “actual access” to sensitive student information, such as tax return information, Social Security numbers or income data.
“What are they doing in that system? Why would they need to be in that system?” Judge Moss said. “There’s not a lot of clarity about what the DOGE employees are doing.”
