DOGE and the Department of Education

Editor’s Note: This article is part of the DOGE Files, a series of investigations into federal grants to nonprofits that Capital Research Center is conducting. We are pleased the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and others are exploring the vast forest of nonprofits trying to influence the U.S. government—an area that Capital Research Center has spent years mapping.

This article explores grants made by the Department of Education, particularly for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.

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The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is an entity established within the Executive Office of the President and led by entrepreneur Elon Musk, which plans to focus on (among other things) government spending and waste. That is a laudable objective. One area in which the federal government spends a tremendous amount of money is grants to nonprofits. An analysis of these grants from USASpending.gov provides examples of some of the things that DOGE may wish to examine.

While government efficiency should hopefully be a bipartisan aim, DOGE is specifically associated with the second Trump Administration. Accordingly—and for both recentness and simplicity—this analysis focuses on grants with performance periods that began during the Biden Administration. It pays particular attention to grants that conservative Americans might find ideologically objectionable, as well as grants with questionable usefulness or effectiveness. The amounts given refer to the total “obligated amount” according to USASpending.gov, which does not necessarily correspond to the total “outlayed amount” at any given time.

The following are some examples of federal grants made to nonprofits by the U.S. Department of Education.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

The elimination of controversial diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs has become a government-wide priority under the Trump Administration, and the Department of Education is no exception. A January 23 press release promised that, in accordance with the president’s executive orders and associated guidance, the department would conduct a “comprehensive review of all agency programs and services to identify additional initiatives and working groups that may be advancing a divisive DEI agenda, including programs using coded or imprecise language to disguise their activity.”

DEI spending at the Department of Education was the subject of a major report released by the advocacy group Parents Defending Education in December 2024. Further analysis provides some specific examples of DEI-related grantmaking to nonprofits.

From 2022 through 2025, the department awarded nearly $19.2 million to a group called the Center for Leadership and Educational Equity (CLEE), more than half of which appears to have been initiated in the weeks following the 2024 presidential election. In its most recent tax filings from 2023, the nonprofit reported that approximately half of its total revenue came from government grants. CLEE believes that “our educational system is designed to maintain systemic inequities” and that pervasive institutional racism requires white teachers to examine the supposed classroom impacts of “their whiteness.” All teachers, according to CLEE, must commit to “anti-racist and anti-oppression practices that affirm the full and complex identities of their students,” while at the same time acknowledging their own need “to relinquish and share power” and recognizing that “learning is mediated and defined by each student’s different way of knowing and making sense of their world.”

In 2022, the department awarded $14.25 million to the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards to support a project entitled “From the Margins to the Center: Supporting Teacher Diversity, Quality, and Retention.” A press release explained that “the project has a specific focus on engaging and supporting educators of color.” The National Board of Professional Teaching Standards describes itself as “an anti-racist and inclusive organization” that believes “systemic racism, inequity, and violence permeate every dimension of American life.” The presidents of both major national teachers unions—Randi Weingarten and Becky Pringle—sit on the group’s board of directors.

From 2022 through 2023, the department awarded over $9.5 million to the Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium (MAEC), whose mission is to “promote excellence and equity in education to achieve social justice.” In 2023, it received 88 percent of its total revenue from government grants. MAEC’s website reveals numerous examples of left-of-center ideological bias. The group condemned the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade and resulting effects on “childbearing people”—it intentionally refused to use the word “women.” The following year it accused the conservative-leaning Supreme Court of promoting “a mindset shift where inequity is not only acceptable but legitimized and supported” through its decisions. In a 2018 paper funded by the Department of Education, MAEC wrote that critical race theory was among the “grounding constructs” that school leaders might find helpful in guiding their interactions with “diverse communities.” MAEC also maintains an extensive library of resources grouped by race/ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. The group’s recommendations for Women’s History Month include listening to a podcast hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw (described as “a leading scholar of critical race theory”), following Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) on social media, and reading a Harper’s Bazaar article entitled “Black Trans Women Have Always Been Integral in the Fight for Women’s Rights.”

Also in 2022, the department awarded $6.26 million to the National Center for Teacher Residencies (NCTR) to support a project called “Centering Equity: Building & Scaling Teacher Residencies.” A press release explained that the program would develop “14 teacher residency programs for under-represented, diverse teacher candidates” in five states. One of the groups that NCTR announced it would be working with was the Center for Racial Equity in Education, a North Carolina-based nonprofit created to deal “explicitly with race and education issues” in the state and expose what it alleges is “the role of systemic racism in education.”

In 2024, the department awarded $4 million to a group called SMASH (officially the MK Level Playing Field Institute) to “promote equity in computer science pathways for historically-excluded students.” SMASH’s mission is “to build a strong, diverse, and socially conscious tech workforce,” and it describes itself as the product of “a decades long legacy of diversity and inclusion advocacy by our founder.” From December 2021 through January 2025, the department awarded $10 million to the Texas-based Intercultural Development Research Association, which operates the Southern Education Equity Network to advocate for DEI in schools, including through model policies. In 2021, the department awarded $2 million to RTI International (officially the Research Triangle Institute) to support its Culturally Responsive Teaching for Student Equitable Achievement (CuRTSEA) program.

AIR and RTI Sanitize Their Websites

Some major federal grantees and contractors have responded to the new administration’s opposition to DEI in dramatic ways. Consider the rapid and remarkable purge of DEI material from the websites of two major recipients of federal money, including from the Department of Education: the American Institutes for Research in the Behavioral Sciences (AIR) and RTI International, both of which operate as 501(c)(3) charities. Major organization-wide DEI initiatives that had previously been proudly promoted by both nonprofits have almost completely disappeared. The amount of federal money involved adds important context to this development.

From June 2021 through January 2025, the Department of Education awarded $92.4 million worth of grants to AIR, plus over $178.5 million worth of contracts. Going all the way back to fiscal year 2008, the federal government as a whole has sent approximately $2.6 billion to the nonprofit—nearly half of which from the Department of Education. In 2023 AIR brought in over $355 million in total revenue, three-quarters of which from government grants. That same year, it paid its then-CEO David Myers nearly $2.2 million. As an aside, it would be interesting to ask a sampling of ordinary American taxpayers whether they considered this to be reasonable executive compensation at a primarily taxpayer-funded nonprofit.

Myers (who has since retired) publicly called diversity and inclusion a “priority” for AIR, going so far as to deem the concept “mission critical” to the organization’s success. Jessica Heppen, who succeeded Myers as president and CEO, likewise stated in 2024 that “DEI is at the foundation of everything we do at AIR.” Indeed, as recently as December 2024, the group’s website featured a page entitled “Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” which flatly declared that the nonprofit could not achieve its mission without DEI. That page also promoted a host of organizational DEI initiatives under the leadership of Karen Francis, AIR’s vice president and chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer. By January 2025, the webpage had been re-titled “Our Commitment to Culture, Belonging, and Quality in Our Work,” all references to DEI had been scrubbed, and there was no mention of Francis.

On another webpage that was recently taken offline, AIR explained how it maintained a DEI Council responsible for overseeing the nonprofit’s DEI commitments, which specifically included linking “DEI metrics to eligibility for incentives, rewards, and promotion across AIR” and changing internal organizational practices so that they would “lead to defined equitable outcomes.” The group’s website homepage, which previously advertised its commitment to DEI, no longer does. AIR even removed its response to the 2020 murder of George Floyd, in which the group condemned American society broadly (and law enforcement specifically) as pervasively and violently racist

A similar situation occurred at RTI International. RTI is an enormous nonprofit—its total revenue exceeded $1.2 billion in 2023—and an enormous recipient of federal tax dollars. According to USASpending.gov, it has been awarded an astonishing $13.1 billion since fiscal year 2008, with the largest share coming from the Department of Health and Human Services. The Department of Education awarded the group nearly $14.3 million worth of grants and $77.8 million worth of contracts from June 2021 through October 2024. In 2023, RTI International paid its president over $1.2 million and reported having 1,750 employees who were paid more than $100,000.

On RTI International’s website, a page that in 2024 was titled “Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging” was in 2025 renamed simply to “Belonging at RTI,” and accompanying staff testimonials touting the importance of DEI were erased. Gone too was the nonprofit’s declaration that it proudly applies DEI principles “globally at every level and across every function.” RTI also deleted a 2020 press release detailing its “racial justice and equity” commitments, which had included (among other things) promises to make race an explicit factor in RTI’s “sourcing and subcontracting efforts,” to bolster its “support for research into systemic and structural racism,” and to provide “bias and racial justice” training to its staff.

Also purged from RTI’s website was its Transformative Research Unit for Equity, launched in 2022 to focus on “the design and implementation of equity-centered and culturally responsive research practices, and trusted partnerships with marginalized communities.” RTI also removed a webpage on “Pronouns and Gender Inclusivity,” which had explained the importance of pronoun usage to various manifestations of gender identity and how using the proper ones helped further RTI’s mission. In addition to DEI, RTI also dramatically scaled back its advertised focus on climate change, removing webpages that had formerly touted the nonprofit’s work in climate policy, climate justice and equity, and the economic impacts of climate change.

Needless to say, these are some remarkable changes that amount to a near-total about face on what had hitherto been firmly expressed, core convictions. As nonprofits, it would be interesting to hear AIR and RTI explain the reasoning behind the changes. Has the way in which they view their charitable, tax-exempt mission suddenly changed? AIR had previously declared that its mission was unachievable without DEI. For its part—mainly given the sheer amount of taxpayer money involved—DOGE may wish to examine the federal government’s funding of these two research nonprofits.

Final Thoughts

These are some examples of Department of Education grants to nonprofits that DOGE may be interested in investigating, but this short list is certainly far from exhaustive. In 2022, the department awarded $868,451 to the Tides Center, the principal fiscal sponsorship provider within the network of related Tides entities that collectively constitutes one of the largest and most important left-of-center nonprofit funding networks in the country. Interested readers are also encouraged to browse the list of grants and contracts compiled by Parents Defending Education, many of which involve funding to local school districts and universities. For instance, George Washington University was recently awarded a pair of grants totaling over $1.1 million for “encouraging diversity and inclusion in East Asian studies.”

With respect to DEI initiatives specifically, the fundamental problem involves treating Americans as members of immutable categories rather than as individuals. Are people diverse? Absolutely, and that’s generally a good thing. But in most of the ways that matter, they are diverse as unique human individuals, not as members of distinct human classes. Treating people differently based on characteristics such as race or ethnicity is the very essence of discrimination. The federal government should have nothing to do with it, much less actively encourage it. DOGE is right to scrutinize funding for all such efforts across the entire federal government.

This is especially acute in the context of education, which by its very nature shapes how people grow up to view the world around them. It is difficult to imagine anything that would do more to ensure that Americans see themselves principally as members of different sub-societal categories, rather than as different individuals, than purposefully gearing education policy toward such categories. Even granting DEI advocates the benefit of the doubt and assuming that their efforts are (at least in their own minds) mostly well-intentioned, wouldn’t this be precisely the opposite outcome desired? At the very least, American tax dollars should not be flowing to groups that seek to divide Americans along such lines.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/doge-and-the-department-of-education/