Despite Concerns, IES Spent 99% of Expiring Funds

After months of delayed spending and mounting public concerns, the Trump administration followed through on its repeated promise to dole out the money Congress allocated for education research before the end of the fiscal year.

As of Sept. 28—two days before the deadline—the Institute of Education Sciences had obligated 99.54 percent of its total $768 million budget, IES Acting Director Matthew Soldner told a federal judge, who was overseeing a lawsuit that sought to compel the Education Department to spend the money. Soldner noted that some funds for IES do go unspent each year, but that amount is “always” less than 1 percent of the agency’s budget.

Higher education research advocates and congressional Democrats have worried for months that the administration would let the funds expire. IES has two years to spend research funding, and according to the lawsuit, it had about $316 million—or about 41 percent—left to spend as of May. By Sept. 17, the agency still had yet to obligate about $180 million, court records show. That means IES officials spent 23 percent of the congressional funds first appropriated in March 2025 in roughly two weeks.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit had asked the judge to rule in their favor and order IES to obligate the funds, but Massachusetts District Judge Allison Burroughs decided the “more prudent course” was not to rule on the motion, relying on “the truthfulness of [the] Defendants.” Instead, she asked the government to report back by Sept. 28 or “whenever all the obligations due Sept. 30 have been completed.” After that, if the department had “misled the court,” she said she may reconsider injunctive relief.

“We’ve told the media for weeks, if not months, that we were committed to using appropriated funds to meet our statutory obligations,” Education Department spokesperson Ellen Keast told Inside Higher Ed. “Not sure why it’s this hard for the media to wrap their head around ED doing exactly what we said we would do.”

The plaintiffs said in a news release that the department’s Sept. 28 update was “an important outcome,” but it “should not have come down to the final days of the fiscal year.”

The Education Department did not answer questions seeking more specifics about where the $180 million went.

Historically, the department allocates a large portion of its funds through new grant competitions. But those can take months to conduct, and multiple experts said they don’t recall seeing any new grant competitions announced for fiscal year 2026. According to one court filing, IES has made both new awards and noncompeting continuation awards to grantees of the National Center for Education Research.

The plaintiffs noted that the department “needs enough time to run the grant process the way it is supposed to be run” by “putting opportunities out for competition to reviewing applications and making awards.”

Meanwhile, several education-research experts who spoke on background for fear of losing their grant award or tarnishing relationships argued that IES has gotten some of the money out the door in the last few months by giving existing grants all of their funding up front—a practice known as front-loading or “forward funding.”

Other federal agencies have used this practice. For example, the National Institutes of Health has been obligating funds up front for research grants that are usually funded over multiple years. An analysis from the Association of American Medical Colleges showed that in fiscal year 2025, NIH awarded more than 2,000 front-loaded multiyear grants, totaling $2.2 billion. By comparison, in fiscal year 2024 the agency only awarded 1,067 such grants, for a total of $960 million.

For fiscal year 2026, Congress added a provision in its appropriations act that banned NIH from obligating any more money toward “multiyear grants” than it did last year. In fiscal year 2026, AAMC data showed, NIH had allocated $1.1 billion in multiyear funding toward 1,402 research grants as of Aug. 31.

Research advocates and lawmakers warn that front-loading is a bad practice, as it concentrates more funding on fewer projects rather than spreading the wealth across a broader scope of researchers, which prevents new research projects from launching.

‘Eggs in One Basket’

One grant recipient said that in the last month the department issued them more than two years’ worth of grant funding for an existing multiyear project at once.

“There was no discussion. It was just, ‘FYI, this is what we’re doing,’” the source recalled.

On top of the forward funding, the grant recipient added that they received “an additional supplement of money.”

Two other sources familiar with the institute’s spending said they have also heard about the department front-loading funds on existing grants in recent months. One had directly spoken with two additional grant recipients who benefited from the practice.

They also fear that the practice will harm education innovation. Even the grant recipient who saw the forward funding as a relief after fearfully watching thousands of grants get cut since Trump took office voiced some concerns.

“With research, if you put all your eggs in one basket and your goal is to learn, then you’re going to learn just one thing, versus learning potentially 20 different things from 20 different projects,” they said. On top of that, “a lot of things don’t work. You may have 20 projects, and 18 of them are going to find things that are not useful … If you only invest in one project, what if that one thing is, this intervention didn’t work? Then what’s next?”

ED and the Department of Health and Human Services have also front-loaded funds in the Child Care Access Means Parents in School program. This year ED and HHS funded 40 CCAMPIS awardees, compared to the expected 148 mentioned in the competition notice. And while the award list shows $18.2 million allocated for the 2026–27 project year, records obtained by Inside Higher Ed and New America show that the 40 recipients collectively received $71.4 million. Congress allocated $75 million to the CCAMPIS program for fiscal year 2026.

“The grant amounts are strikingly high for many institutions compared to prior years,” New America wrote in its analysis. “That suggests that rather than funding the first year of a four-year cycle, ED instead frontloaded all of the money into a single year.”

Inside Higher Ed reached out to several other research groups that are frequent grant recipients from IES to ask about their funding, but few responded and those that did declined to comment.

“They’re very concerned,” said one of the experts familiar with IES spending, noting that policy proposals at the Department of Education and the Office of Management and Budget would make it easier for the Trump administration to claw back grants and that researchers are scared. “It creates a lot of hesitation for publicly announcing any federal funding you receive.”

More information about how IES spent its money should come out in other federal spending reports, such as the SF-133, later this month.

Lawmakers, including Sen. Patty Murray, the Washington State Democrat who is the vice chair on the Senate appropriations committee, have also expressed concern about the practice of forward funding.

“Let’s be clear about what front-loading grants means: a dramatic cut in the number of communities across the country who will get federal funding for everything from education research to literacy programs, and so much more,” Murray said in a statement to Inside Higher Ed. “This is an inexcusable way to get funding Congress appropriated out the door, and as students across the country fall further and further behind, the Department needs to reverse course on this harmful scheme that has already cut the number of grants awarded by over 1,000 in fiscal year 2026.”