The U.S. Department of Education’s research arm has nearly a quarter of its annual budget left to spend with only a month before those funds expire, the department revealed in a court filing last week.
Congress each year gives the Institute of Education Sciences an annual round of funds that must be spent by the end of the following fiscal year—essentially, a two-year period. Out of $768 million lawmakers approved in 2025 for IES, the agency had spent $587 million as of Aug. 26, according to IES Acting Director Matthew Soldner. That leaves roughly $180 million for the agency to spend before Sept. 30—far more than the typical amount left over with only a few weeks left.
These figures emerged as part of the department’s response to an ongoing lawsuit alleging that it, along with the White House Office of Management and Budget, has illegally squelched education research funding under President Donald Trump, OMB Director Russell Vought, and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon.
“IES intends to spend all funds appropriated by Congress in a timely manner, in full compliance with all statutory and regulatory requirements, and in accordance with the operation of the programs it administers,” Soldner wrote Aug. 26 in a declaration responding to the lawsuit.
But spending nearly $180 million in 35 days could be a tall order for IES, which lost more than 160 of its 190 staffers during last year’s governmentwide staffing cutbacks. Among other priorities, IES had more than half its $40 million allocation for staff salaries left to spend with two months remaining out of the 24 Congress gave it to spend the money, according to a publicly available federal report that shows agency spending through July.
Education researchers have taken notice of disrupted IES operations. Melissa Arnold Lyon, an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Albany, SUNY, more than a year ago sent agency staff some preliminary findings from her analysis of proprietary IES data to study the effects of child-labor policies on educational outcomes. She still hasn’t heard back.
“We essentially gave up on that study, unfortunately,” Lyon said.
Some researchers told Education Week that they and their peers are wary of applying for federal grants given the turmoil at IES.
Grant applications “often take months of preparation and, in many cases, are revised and fine-tuned over years of rejection and resubmission,” said Cameron Anglum, an education and public policy researcher at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. “The calculus around devoting substantial time and effort to such endeavors has changed sharply.”
An Education Department spokesperson said IES plans to use its remaining fiscal 2025 money “in service of its statutory obligations,” but didn’t answer detailed questions about its plans to avoid letting IES money lapse.
“IES intends to use its remaining FY25 funds to fully fund existing research grants, as well as to support other high-quality statistical and evaluation activities in service of its statutory obligations,” Savannah Newhouse, the agency’s press secretary, wrote in a statement to Education Week.
IES spending has slowed considerably under Trump
During Trump’s first presidency, IES never had more than 3% of its annual appropriation left to spend 22 months into the 24-month funding cycle, according to federal spending reports.
Similarly, during the Biden administration, IES had consistently spent at least 90 percent of its two-year budget by Aug. 1 of the second year of available funding.
Now, with a month left in the fiscal year, IES has to spend 24% of its fiscal 2025 budget. Any unspent funds after Sept. 30 will return to the Treasury instead of fueling additional education research projects. The department did just that with $6.8 million in IES funding last September.
On top of the money at risk of expiring, IES has barely made a dent in the $791 million Congress supplied earlier this year, with an expiration date of Sept. 30, 2027. OMB is currently withholding $465 million of that sum from the agency, more than six months after the point when the funds typically become available.
As of Aug. 1, according to the federal spending report, IES had obligated only $60 million in fiscal 2026 funds, all for the National Assessment of Educational Progress. That leaves more than $700 million that’s now likely to carry over into the second year.
Last year, IES carried over $510 million from fiscal 2025; more than one-third of those dollars remain unspent with one month left.
Meanwhile, out of the remaining $180 million from fiscal 2025, a staffer in the department’s budget service told key congressional committee heads last month it plans to spend more than $68 million differently from what lawmakers initially intended, according to the Aug. 26 court filing.
That includes trimming $50 million Congress had set aside for data collection, $16 million for regional education laboratories, and $2.7 million for studies of state and local implementation of federal special education law.
Those funds will instead go toward general-purpose research grants ($24 million more), research grants concerning education for students with disabilities ($28 million more), and statewide longitudinal data systems ($17 million more).
The department appears to have followed the legally required steps for reprogramming IES funds. Neither Soldner’s court filing nor the attached notification to Congress explains why the department decided to reprogram those funds.
Tens of millions of dollars could expire later this month
IES is the part of the Education Department where spending has lagged most significantly relative to previous years. But spending has also slowed down in other areas, raising concerns that the department for the second year in a row could let tens of millions of congressionally appropriated dollars expire.
The department’s office for civil rights had nearly one-third of its annual $140 million budget left to spend as of Aug. 1. The agency—whose staff has shrunk by about half since the start of the Trump administration last year—also had roughly 29 percent of its $399.4 million staff salary budget left to dispense in August and September.
Federal law requires agencies to spend their full appropriations within the time period lawmakers prescribe. Failure to do so risks running afoul of the Impoundment Control Act, a Nixon-era law that prohibits the president from unilaterally canceling appropriations Congress already approved.
The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan federal watchdog funded by Congress, last year found seven instances of the Trump administration violating that law.
None of those cases involved the Education Department—though GAO had dozens more investigations underway.
Meanwhile, the research field is feeling the absence of IES at full strength.
Lyon, the SUNY researcher, had been eagerly anticipating the arrival of a new longitudinal dataset tracking children’s academic progress nationwide from kindergarten to 3rd grade; the most recent such study was from the 2010-11 school year.
She uses that IES dataset as a teaching tool for her statistics students.
“I would like to update my dataset because 2010-11 is a long time ago, but I am not sure what data I’ll use,” Lyon said.
Recovering from the extended standstill may be impossible, researchers lamented.
“We cannot go back and gather data from this time period when the grants and grant reviews have been halted,” said Sarah Beach, the director of research at the Education Rights Institute at the University of Virginia School of Law. “Therefore, we have and will continue to have a huge gap in educational research that would have informed better interventions and systems for our nation’s learners.”
