NPR - DOGE abruptly cut a program for teens with disabilities. This student is 'devastated'

April 14, 2025
5:00 AM ET
Cory Turner



If you visit the website for Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), you'll find a "Wall of Receipts" listing more than 7,000 federal contracts it has terminated.

Little detail is provided, besides the "savings" from each cancellation, and it's hard to determine the cost or collateral damage of all these cuts. But for some families, there has been a cost.

One of these programs, cancelled on Feb. 10, was called Charting My Path for Future Success. It was a research-based effort to help students with disabilities make the sometimes difficult transition from high school into college or the world of work and self-sufficiency.

For just three weeks, beginning in January, some 1,600 high school juniors were enrolled in the program in 13 school districts across the country, including in Virginia, Arizona and Georgia.

A U.S. Education Department spokesperson, Madi Biedermann, told NPR in a statement that Charting My Path was a research project "with questionable implementation" and that too much of the program's $43 million cost, by DOGE's accounting, was going to contractors, not kids.

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