Last Friday, the report on “Reimagining the Institute of Education Sciences” was released. For those outside the education research world, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) is the nonpartisan research arm of the U.S. Department of Education. It is—or was—the backbone of federally funded education research. It is also the subagency that DOGE all but dismantled.
To the credit of Amber Northern, who was tapped by the Trump Administration to lead this effort, the report defends IES. But it is difficult to ignore that so many researchers lost their jobs and federal contracts and grants were cancelled, sending ripple effects throughout the research community, and only afterward did the Administration’s own commissioned report conclude that the subagency should exist and that education research is worth federal investment after all.
The report had some good ideas in it, but much of what the report proposes isn’t new. Many of the recommendations came directly from the research community—through responses to a Request for Information (RFI) issued after contracts were cancelled and staff were terminated, through years of field feedback, through the National Academy of Sciences report on IES and others. Researchers are curious and committed people. Even after losing their jobs, many still submitted detailed comments on how to improve the agency. From what I can tell, those comments now form the backbone of this “reimagining.”
To be clear: the problem isn’t the report’s recommendations. Many are sensible. The problem is the suggestion that dismantling IES was necessary to implement them. As the Acting Director, Matt Soldner, alluded to in his blog post, many of the recommendations were already underway before DOGE cancelled contracts and reduced staff to a skeletal crew.
I can speak most directly about the program I worked on, the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC). The report recommends that WWC:
● Prioritize practice guides for educators.
● Eliminate “ad hoc” reviews.
● Improve database usability and machine-readability, including adding an API.
● Make the website more user-friendly.
These proposals are being framed as course correction. In reality, they describe work that was already underway. Before the cuts, seven active contracts supported practice guides on early literacy, STEM instruction, college and career readiness, student behavior, chronic absenteeism, high school success, and early childhood students with disabilities. DOGE cancelled all but one. The report now calls for doubling down on that very work.
The report calls for eliminating ad hoc study reviews. Around $0.5 million—roughly 2 percent of the combined funding for practice guides and ad hoc reviews—went to ad hoc reviews.[1] If the policy decision is to eliminate them, fine. But eliminating 2 percent of funding did not require dismantling 100 percent of the program.
The report also calls for making the WWC database more user-friendly and accessible via API. That work was already underway under an existing contract that DOGE cancelled.
Improving the website’s usability was also a long-standing internal priority. Many of us also raised this issue in public comments. The barrier wasn’t imagination—it was resources. Meaningful improvements required additional funding beyond base program allocations.
The report indicates that people are “ChatGPT-ing” research instead of using the WWC. There’s a real conversation to be had about how large language models intersect with evidence clearinghouses. But the implication that AI can simply replace structured evidence review misunderstands both. Tools like ChatGPT can summarize text. They cannot independently adjudicate methodological rigor without explicit criteria—and those judgments often hinge on details buried in footnotes and statistical appendices. AI can assist processes. It cannot substitute for them.
I am not saying that the program was perfect—every program needs continuous improvement. And, to be fair, I can’t speak in detail about every IES program. Some programs may have needed more substantial improvements than others.
The field’s response to the report has understandably focused on protecting IES as an institution. Everyone who values evidence in education wants it to survive. Many are genuinely relieved that this “reimagining” effort was led by someone who understands the value of research—not every agency has been so fortunate. But it is also fair to ask whether the damage was necessary.
Hundreds—if not thousands—of education researchers lost their jobs in a brutal labor market. Early-career scholars and new PhDs are facing a shrinking set of opportunities. Nonprofits, foundations, districts, and states are being squeezed simultaneously, limiting their ability to absorb displaced researchers. Some have already left the field entirely.
Research ecosystems are not light switches. You can’t flip them off and expect them to light up when you flip them back on. Rebuilding requires people. It requires trust. It requires continuity. If the plan is to “reimagine” IES, who exactly will carry out that vision?
A real re-imagination of IES wouldn’t have required a large part of the research workforce to lose their jobs. It would not have cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars to implement the reduction in force in just one subdivision.
We can acknowledge the positive elements of the report. We can support rebuilding IES. But we do not have to pretend that the path taken to get here was necessary—or justified. Further, there is no guarantee that these recommendations will ever be funded or implemented. And it strains credibility to portray this Administration as suddenly committed to the importance of research.
When damage is reframed as opportunity, when interrupted improvements are repackaged as innovations, that is not visionary leadership. And when the people who lived through the damage are told this was always the plan, it is gaslighting.
DOGE did real harm. Calling it “reimagining” does not undo that harm. And we do not have to parrot a narrative that says otherwise.
[1] A special thanks to Erin Pollard for helping me pull the contract award information from https://www.usaspending.gov/.
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