Elon Musk’s DOGE team has been hacking its way through the Department of Education and chopping off what it can. This has mostly meant targeting small, discretionary programs—since bigger programs like Title I, IDEA, and Pell are popular and written into statute. Perhaps most notably, DOGE put the kibosh on a reported $881 million in contracts at the Institute of Education Sciences.

Predictably, as is the case with every budget cut and everything Donald Trump, the education world’s reaction was, well, apocalyptic.

“It’s apocalyptic, is all I can say,” the director of one federal office told The 74’s Greg Toppo. Dana Tofig of the American Institutes for Research deemed the cancelations “an incredible waste of taxpayer dollars,” arguing that the canceled contracts are “exactly the work that determines which programs are effective uses of federal dollars.” At Education Week, Larry Ferlazzo’s popular blog opened by addressing the question: “What’s the resistance strategy? How do we shut it down?”

In education circles, the presumption was that I’d share this outrage. I don’t, which has surprised a lot of people—probably because I’ve long argued that Washington has a vital role to play when it comes to education research and data. And while I’m troubled by Team DOGE’s chaotic execution, I do believe there’s much at IES that deserves to be cut or overhauled. Long experience has given me little cause to suspect that a more measured approach would yield any meaningful change.

So, I’m conflicted. Let me try to unpack this a bit.

First off, it’s good to recognize that Musk’s grip-it-and-rip-it DOGE team is operating pretty independently of the staff at the Department of Education. While the new team at the department features a lot of people with deep expertise in education programs, DOGE doesn’t. Thus far, their approach has basically been to cut as much as it can. Period. This has yielded a lot of indiscriminate activity.

Now, generally speaking, I’m no fan of blunderbuss policy or rash action. In the abstract, I agree with Adam Gamoran, Biden’s never-confirmed pick to head IES, who argued, “It would be one thing to say, all right, we’re going to undertake a careful process of examination to determine which of these contracts are really paying off. But to take a sledgehammer to the whole set of contracts is capricious.”

The problem? There’s little appetite for making measured, careful cuts. I’ve seen zero evidence that the education research community is willing to seriously assess the returns on those contracts or engage in a constructive discussion about cuts. Betsy DeVos’s tenure offers something of a case study. DeVos pursued deliberate rule-making, worked with Congress, and sought to address issues like the department’s collective-bargaining agreement incrementally. She proposed relatively modest spending cuts, but the results weren’t encouraging. DeVos was maligned in the press. She was undercut by leaks and resistance from hostile career staff. She was blocked and mocked at every turn by a web of K–12 and higher ed interest groups. She was subjected to vile calumny by education researchers. Later, DeVos’s successor Miguel Cardona didn’t even feign interest in weeding out wasteful activities.

Former IES director Mark Schneider has called for overhauling bureaucratic and wasteful routines that allow irrelevant activities to persist in perpetuity. He points out that he spent six years as head of IES trying unsuccessfully to make measured change without result under either Trump 1.0 or Biden. DOGE’s whirling blade, he argues, offers a sorely-needed opportunity to “clean out the attic.”

It’s worth appreciating the logic of DOGE. Its operating assumption is that traditional Republicans can’t make careful, deliberate cuts and that Democrats won’t even try. If officials try to move slowly and carefully, the thinking goes, nothing will get done. Thus, the only viable option is to move fast, break stuff, and slash away before recalcitrant staff and hostile interest groups bring things to a halt. It may not be an especially appealing strategy, but it’s a practical one.

Look, we do need good data on how students are performing, college outcomes, and the like. (Note that the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the College Scorecard were spared from DOGE’s knife.) Some of the cuts are indeed dumb, like keeping NAEP but yanking the contract on the Common Core of Data, which is used to generate the sample of schools for the national assessment. And some are ham-fisted, like the blanket termination of multi-year contracts that have already been mostly paid out. A few of those studies may be useful, and taxpayers won’t get any return on them.

There’s also a theatrical hypocrisy to DOGE. Are we serious about not burying our kids in debt? I hope so. But tackling a trillion-dollar annual deficit requires addressing the entitlement programs (namely, Medicare and Social Security) which constitute the lion’s share of the problem. Well, the Trump administration has signaled those are off-limits, which means these cuts are of modest import. (If we accept DOGE’s numbers, wiping out the IES contracts doesn’t amount to even one-tenth of 1 percent of this year’s deficit.) DOGE is targeting programs and staff that the executive can easily cut, not necessarily those that are obviously wasteful or inefficient. Even a cursory assessment of costs and benefits could have produced a better result.

But, come on. Washington has indeed paid billions and billions of dollars for overpriced consulting services and low-quality, scarcely read studies that mostly feed the coffers of top-heavy contractors. And it’s tough to insist “research is essential” when we’re drowning in education research, evaluations, and studies of dubious relevance where the cost-benefit proposition isn’t obvious. When I survey the list of cancelled contracts, I don’t think many represent an especially good use of public funds. While your mileage may vary, I feel comfortable saying the lion’s share deserved to be pulled.

It’s also tough to insist that research is rigorous or apolitical after the Biden administration put a fat finger on the scale when it came to federally funded research priorities and competitions. That’s doubly true when entities that claim to speak for education research, like the American Educational Research Association, have unapologetically and unabashedly waded into ideological and political waters.

Given all this, my read on what’s happening at the IES is that the Trump administration has concluded the most viable tack is to chop all that it can and hope that the shock to the system will permit a reset. Will that strategy prove successful? It’ll depend on whether the result is a streamlined IES, a coherent strategy for re-bidding select contracts, more timely and rigorous work, and a willingness to prioritize high-value education science. Making that happen will, of course, fall to the department appointees rather than to DOGE. It’s fair to say that DOGE’s demolition crew had the easier task. We’ll see how the department staff rebuilds from the rubble.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”