Department of Education is very much on the Trump chopping block.

Details have not fully been released yet, but President Trump has signaled plans to dismantle it and move some of its key functions elsewhere.

The Education Department oversees student loans, federal funds for lower income students, and special education programs, among many other things.

Already, the Doge Group and the administration have put a number of staff on leave

and are stopping more than $900 million in contracts that allow for key education research

on student and school performance. For more, we're joined now by Laura Meckler, National Education

Writer for the Washington Post. Thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me.

So the $900 million worth of contracts that Elon Musk and his allies have canceled,

all but decimated the agency's research division, which is a big part of what the Department

of Education does.

It gathers research and data.

What's the expected impact?

Well, a lot of this stuff is sort of low-key stuff that we don't really think about.

So, for instance, one of the things that this Institute for Education Sciences does is they do sort of a census of all schools.

They gather information about how many schools are there, how many kids are enrolled, what's the demographics of those students, what's the demographics of the teaching force? This is information that we use for other

federal programs. It's information that other researchers rely on, the journalists rely on,

that really forms the backbone of our understanding. So that's an example of one of the

contracts that was suddenly canceled out of the blue on Monday.

You also have work to evaluate programs, just try to understand better of sort of what works and what doesn't,

whether it be an early childhood program or a literacy program.

So it ranges from sort of big things like that to sort of niche programs.

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