June 2025
Thirteen Members of National Board of Education Sciences Also Dismissed
On June 18, AERA—along with the American Association of Colleges and Universities, American Association of Physics Teachers, American Association of University Professors, Women in Engineering ProActive Network, and United Auto Workers (representing graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, faculty, and university staff)—filed a suit challenging DOGE’s unlawful mass termination of grants at the National Science Foundation (NSF). The suit cites serious harms to AERA, AERA members, and the broader education research and U.S. scientific enterprise.
AERA and its partners are represented by Democracy Forward and the Norton Law Firm. Democracy Forward also represents AERA and the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness in a separate, ongoing lawsuit challenging the dismantling of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) (see related update below).
Starting on April 18, the Trump administration launched a purge of previously awarded grants and other funding assistance at NSF, eliminating over 1,660 grants with obligations of over $1 billion. Almost 50% of these terminated grants came from the STEM Education Directorate (EDU), and just under 20% from the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate (SBE). The cancellations are causing serious harm to the work of academic researchers, upending the progress of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars, and undermining U.S. scientific progress and its societal benefits (see related May AERA Highlights story).
“Many, many of our members—and the progress of science more broadly—are harmed by grant terminations that cut off in droves significant NSF peer-reviewed studies,” said AERA Executive Director Felice J. Levine in a Democracy Forward news release. “The loss of this investment and NSF’s brazen departure from congressionally mandated requirements to build an inclusive STEM workforce are a tragedy that, if sustained, will simply set American scientific research, innovation, and progress back for decades.”
In a separate development, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced on June 25 that it would assume the NSF’s current headquarters in Alexandria, Va. No public timeline has been released for the move or for relocating the roughly 1,800 NSF employees who will be displaced.
NSF Grant Termination Survey
To document the consequences of the terminations, AERA, in conjunction with other scientific societies, is undertaking a survey to build a comprehensive database on these terminations. Launched on June 6 and 9, AERA continues to reach out to all principal investigators (PIs) and co-PIs of terminated NSF grants from across fields of science and types of awards to gather information on direct harms and broader impacts.
Responses are requested as soon as possible and ideally by July 10. PIs or co-PIs who did not receive the survey via email (sent from govrelations@aera.net through SurveyMonkey) can directly contact govrelations@aera.net with their NSF award number(s) to receive a unique survey link for each award.
Legal Action on the Dismantling of IES
On June 12, a U.S. District Court judge in Maryland declined to issue a preliminary injunction in AERA v. Department of Education, after IES began the process of reinstating several cancelled contracts.
While the court denied preliminary relief, it acknowledged that the plaintiffs are likely right that “IES is not doing a number of tasks Congress requires of it.” The judge emphasized that this decision should not be taken as “predictive of this Court’s ultimate decision on the merits.”
“Despite [this] temporary decision, we remain confident that the court will ultimately affirm the vital role of IES’s work not only for researchers, but also for students, educators, school districts, and policymakers,” said Levine in a Democracy Forward news release. “For scholars, the datasets, surveys, research, and evaluations produced by IES are essential to understanding what works in education and what innovations can improve learning for students from all backgrounds. This work provides the high-quality evidence practitioners and policymakers need to make informed decisions for both today’s students and future generations.”
A June 25 Brookings Institution piece published by AERA member Dominique Baker (University of Delaware) detailed the unprecedented delays in key, congressionally mandated education data as result of the administration cuts.
Separately, on June 3, a federal judge in Washington, D.C. denied a similar injunction in a lawsuit against the Education Department brought by the Association for Education Finance and Policy, the Institute for Higher Education Policy, the National Academy of Education, and the National Council on Measurement in Education.
In a June 5 court filing, the Trump administration stated it would reinstate 20 of 101 canceled IES contracts to meet congressional mandates. However, as reported in The Hechinger Report, it remains highly uncertain whether the full scope of the original contract work would be fully restored or proceed without being first rebid.
Thirteen NBES Members Fired
On May 23, the administration dismissed 13 members of the National Board of Education Sciences (NBES) appointed by President Joe Biden, effectively dismantling the board. Created by Congress in 2002 to advise IES, NBES plays a critical role in shaping federal education research.
In a Time magazine op-ed, former AERA President Shaun Harper (2020-2021)—one of the dismissed members—wrote, “Eliminating the federal education department, defunding IES, and ousting its law-abiding NBES partners will weaken the production and quality of education-focused studies and evaluation activities. . . . Congress and educational leaders will have even less access to trustworthy, high-quality research on what works, what undermines excellence and innovation, and where the U.S. is falling short in fulfilling its educational promises to students and taxpaying families.”