Department of Education

The Department of Education's research and development (R&D) story is really the story of one institution: the Institute of Education Sciences, created in 2002 to bring the standards of medical-style evidence — randomized trials, longitudinal data — to questions about what actually works in classrooms. That is why this series starts in 2003, at $448 million, rather than in the 1970s like most pages here.

It has stayed the smallest research budget among the thirteen agencies tracked here, sitting around $600 million a year in 2017 dollars for two decades. Its real-terms high came in 2010, during the Recovery Act era, at about $720 million, with a visible dip during the 2013 budget sequestration.

Fiscal year 2025 came in at $793 million in current dollars. The 2026 figure is startling: $124 million, a cut of more than 80 percent — the deepest proposed cut, in percentage terms, of any agency in this series. That figure is the estimate from the White House budget request, and Congress declined to follow it: the enacted FY 2026 appropriation held the Institute of Education Sciences essentially flat, at about $790 million. The budget-cycle section below has the numbers.