NPR

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. 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. But some of the people closest to the program – families, educators, and researchers – say Charting My Path could have helped millions of vulnerable teens.