notes on taxpayer funding at the US Department of Education
Last Monday, DOGE came for the US Department of Education (ED). Specifically, it came for ED’s research arm, the Institute for Education Sciences (IES), terminating 89 contracts, purportedly valued at $881 million. But how much savings can taxpayers expect from these cuts?
DOGE’s list of the 89 terminated contracts (unsurprisingly) leaked the day after the cuts were announced. DOGE promised their own receipts by Valentine’s Day, but—in true government fashion—posted them on February 17 (more on that later). Impatient, I started chasing down the receipts myself.
DOGE’s list included each contract’s vendor and contract number and contract values—which did sum to $881,228,611. This let me match most of DOGE’s list with ED’s most recent complete contract list; however, the “Contract Values” on DOGE list seldom matched the “Current Contract Value” on ED’s list (which was the only value on ED’s list). Whenever the two values did not match, DOGE’s values were always higher, by anywhere from $100 to $31,053,151.
Unsatisfied, I next matched the full leaked DOGE list to detailed data from USASpending.gov, but I noticed something odd: while the DOGE list’s values often—but not always—matched a USASpending.gov contract value, they did not consistently match the same type of contract value.
