The U.S. Department of Education’s research wing has announced plans to begin new education research grantmaking, marking the agency’s first grant competition for research in more than 15 months amid a period of sluggish spending unprecedented in recent memory.
The movement suggests that federal education research funding may be coming back online, even as many details remain unclear—such as what will happen to some $224 million in fiscal 2025 funding that the White House withheld for more than a year and released to the agency only this past May. Those funds could expire at the end of September if the Institute of Education Sciences doesn’t spend them by then.
Competitive research grants at IES ground to a near standstill soon after the second Trump administration came in. The agency abruptly canceled or delayed research competitions for fiscal 2025 that had already been announced. And the agency launched no new grant competitions in fiscal 2026, leading to speculation that, like science and health research at other agencies, the Trump administration planned to greatly reduce or even eliminate its role in funding new education research, even as Congress continued to supply dollars.
The announcement, for now, could help assuage those fears.
In an Aug. 6 blog post, IES Acting Commissioner Matthew Soldner outlined plans to issue fiscal 2027 grants in three waves. The first would include competitive grants to train education researchers, bolster states’ use of longitudinal data systems, and develop new statistical and other research methods. In a later wave slotted for December, IES plans to launch competitions for the agency’s two major field-initiated research grants, one for general research in education and one for special education research.
But the process for awarding those grants would look different from past practice. Grants would be given out in fewer topics—STEM, literacy, low-incidence disabilities, and transitions to the workforce among them—and grantees would be organized into “hubs.” Those priorities, Soldner said, will carry through fiscal 2029.
Those changes seem to reflect, at least in part, a recent report from a special adviser about how to update IES’ work. More broadly, researchers have urged the Education Department to make its research investments more efficient and coherent.
Ellen Goldring, a researcher who has benefited from IES funding in the past, said she is optimistic about the variety of grant reviews and awards that the agency plans to fund.
“I think we’re just thrilled that things are starting to open up and flow,” said Goldring, a professor of education leadership and policy at Vanderbilt University.
IES is moving toward more coordination in its research
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency cuts hit IES hard in early 2025. The Trump administration fired staff, cut contracts, and ended grant competitions already underway.
The only competitive grant the agency appears to have given out in 2025 was one worth $5 million to establish a gifted education center at Johns Hopkins University. Last month, IES quietly awarded six new grants examining statewide education policies, and in August, it awarded five on research methods; both sets of awards came from applications submitted before Trump took office.
Meanwhile, the two field-initiated education research grant opportunities historically have been treated as the crown jewels of IES’ research portfolio in part because they are the most flexible. While the agency gets to set priorities in each round of competition, education researchers propose the studies, develop the study methodology, secure partners including states and districts to participate, and conduct the research.
In moving to restrict the topics it will fund, Soldner said IES plans to present a specific research agenda that, across multiple grants it makes, “will generate a cohesive body of knowledge.”
“We believe this approach has the potential to more effectively and efficiently address the nation’s most pressing problems of education practice and policy. It’s also consistent with our statutory charge to ‘accumulate knowledge,’ a decidedly easier endeavor when work is more cohesive from the start,” he wrote in the post.
The emphasis on STEM and reading align with the Trump administration’s overall grant priorities in education, noted Catherine Bradshaw, the dean of the education school at Johns Hopkins University. She hopes that the list may ultimately expand to encompass contextual areas that shape student achievement, such as attendance and mental health.
“The context in which one teaches and learns is exceptionally important, and it would be great to see that filtered into this process,” she said.
Last week’s notice also says that grantees in a given area will be coordinated by a hub, presumably run by the Education Department, which will aim to synthesize their work products for the field. That idea echoes a February report crafted by Amber Northern, a senior vice president for research at the conservative-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute who was brought on by Education Department leaders as a special adviser in 2025 to review IES’ work.
Although the details of the hubs remain to be fleshed out, Goldring believes they potentially could help build more interplay between researchers and policymakers.
“I think all researchers want their work to have impact. They want it to be taken up and discussed and they want it to be in conversation with other ongoing research—past, present, and future,” she said.
So far, the extent of IES’ reorganization appears to be limited to research and does not extend to some of the agency’s other functions, said Northern in an interview.
Nothing in the Soldner blog post, for example, references what will happen to the Regional Educational Labs and Comprehensive Centers. Those two programs are supposed to help states and districts with research needs in high-interest areas like absenteeism and teacher quality. As of Aug. 11, the White House Office of Management and Budget had unlocked none of the $53.7 million Congress appropriated for the regional education labs, and only $50,000 of the $50 million in fiscal 2026 funding for the Comprehensive Centers.
Both programs also would benefit from a coordinator—even a boss—to help avoid duplication of effort and improve their accountability to the field, Northern said.
“You really do need some outside entity to, in some cases, be the parent and adjudicate the miscommunications and the not-playing-nicelys that may be happening and hold them accountable, frankly, for releasing work on time and addressing the needs of the folks in their regions,” she said.
Funding instability is ongoing
The fiscal 2027 grantmaking would amount to about $250 million. Applications for the first wave are due Oct. 1. It’s not yet clear how the slimmed-down staff at IES would administer the grants, or how IES plans to conduct peer review, which was among the contracts canceled in 2025.
The new grant announcements don’t clear up general confusion about just how much money IES has to spend—and whether some of it could be in danger of reverting back to the U.S. Treasury at the end of September.
Under President Donald Trump, IES has been among the slowest divisions in the Education Department to spend its two years of funding, in part because OMB has delayed “apportioning,” or sending to IES, funding from both fiscal 2025 and fiscal 2026.
According to the most recent publicly available OMB documents, OMB has yet to apportion more than $450 million in fiscal 2026 funds IES has 13 months left to spend. Typically, apportionment takes place no more than six weeks after a budget is passed.
Even once the Department of Education has gained access to IES funding, though, the agency has spent it unusually slowly.
The department, according to public spending data available through June 30, had yet to spend 76 percent of IES’ 2025 budget for “research, development, and dissemination”; roughly two-thirds of a $64 million allocation for special education research; and 76 percent of the $122 million budget for statistics and data collection.
Nearly 70 percent of the department’s 2025 budget for staff salaries also remained unspent as of June 30, the data show. IES laid off or otherwise lost 161 employees during the first two months of the second Trump administration, the agency’s inspector general reported in June. All told, IES as of June 30 had access to roughly $223 million in fiscal 2025 funds that expire after Sept. 30.
“The unfortunate situation is that they’re authorized money, they haven’t spent it, and it’s probably going to disappear—a significant amount of it. And that’s very disconcerting because it’s not in alignment with congressional intention,” Bradshaw said.
Lawmakers from both parties have taken notice of IES’ sluggish spending. Nineteen U.S. senators, including two Republicans, wrote to Secretary of Education Linda McMahon in May, urging her to work with OMB on accelerating the pace of spending to avoid letting 2025 funding lapse and crucial research go unfunded.
A coalition of education groups—including Knowledge Alliance, an education research advocacy coalition—on June 30 filed a lawsuit arguing that the Trump administration’s unprecedented withholding of IES and Comprehensive Centers funds violates the law and the U.S. Constitution.
