Recent generations may have taken safety for granted, but today’s youth are growing up in an era of compounded crises – and being safe is their priority.

A virtual wrecking ball took aim last Monday at the relatively small, wonky corner of the Department of Education that I write about every week: evaluation studies and data collection. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) posted on X that it had terminated 89 of these contracts worth $881 million. These particular cuts stunned people involved in education research because they didn’t go after “woke” studies about equity, diversity or “culturally relevant pedagogy” — all more obvious targets of the new administration. Instead, researchers described the canceled projects at the department’s Institute of Education Sciences as rigorous evaluations of how the federal government spends education dollars, efforts to improve the reading and math skills of U.S.

Adolescent suicide is a critical and prevalent issue yet is rarely studied by developmental psychologists. We assert that developmentalists’ lack of engagement has stymied progress on adolescent suici...