Association for Education Finance and Policy v. McMahon

In 2002, Congress passed the Education Sciences Reform Act, which established the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), a semi-independent division of the Department of Education dedicated to conducting, supporting and disseminating high-quality evidence-based research on education in America. Congress, through that Act, required IES to conduct evaluations of various federal education programs, collect data from institutions, localities, and teachers, and provide assistance to state and local education agencies, teachers, researchers, and policymakers. Through this work, IES has served as the backbone of education research in the United States for decades.

In February 2025, the Department of Education began efforts to dismantle IES by cancelling dozens of contracts for research studies and support services vital to IES’s functioning. In March 2025, the Department gave approximately 90% of IES employees notice that they would be terminated. IES also terminated certain data licenses that researchers rely on to conduct their work.

Representing the Association for Education Finance and Policy, an association of 1,000 education researchers and practitioners, and the Institute for Higher Education Policy, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research, policy and advocacy organization, Public Citizen filed a lawsuit challenging the Department’s attempts to eviscerate IES. The complaint alleged that the actions were ultra vires, contrary to the statutes requiring IES to exist and conduct and disseminate research, arbitrary and capricious, and in violation of the Impoundment Control Act and the Anti-Deficiency Act. Soon thereafter, we filed a motion for a preliminary injunction, to stop the harms that were already occurring and the harms that were likely to follow. The court denied the motion on the grounds that the plaintiffs were not likely to succeed on the merits of the claims as drafted.

In June 2025, we filed an amended complaint, challenging eight specific actions taken by the Department:  (1) the termination of the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study 2024 (NPSAS 2024);  (2) the termination of the 2020/25 Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study (BPS:20/25); (3) the termination of the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09); (4) the termination of the High School and Beyond Longitudinal Study of 2022 (HS&B:22); (5) the termination of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten: 2024 (ECLS-K:2024); (6) the termination of IES’s peer review program for new grant funding; (7) the termination of IES’s program for remote access to restricted-use data; and (8) the termination of processing applications for access to restricted-use data.  We also challenged the Department’s unreasonable delay in failing to process three of the Institute for Higher Education Policy’s requests to publish materials that relied on restricted-use data.

After we filed our amended complaint, the Department announced that it would not terminate remote access to restricted-use data as it had previously announced, and also reinstated NPSAS 2024. We then filed a second amended complaint removing the claims related to remote access and NPSAS 2024 from the case.

Briefing on the Department’s motion to dismiss is underway.