How Trump 2.0 upended education research and statistics in one year

"Decades of carefully built infrastructure aimed at improving and tracking how American children learn vanished in an ideological attack...

The first blow came in early February. In a single week, DOGE terminated more than 100 research contracts collectively worth over a billion dollars on paper. The consequences were immediate and staggering. Ten Regional Educational Laboratories (RELs), which had helped states pilot literacy and math interventions, were among these early casualties. Mississippi’s remarkable turnaround in reading achievement, commonly called the “Mississippi Miracle,” was nurtured by the Southeast laboratory, and the sudden loss of this infrastructure created uncertainty for other states in the midst of trying to copy Mississippi.

DOGE canceled an 11-year longitudinal study tracking youth with disabilities through high school into college and the workforce. Data painstakingly collected over five years was effectively discarded overnight. Instruction and support was suddenly yanked from 1,000 students in the study. Disability advocates described it as a “crushing loss.” ...

Even core federal datasets were not spared...."