Gov. Chris Christie fired state education commissioner Bret Schundler this morning after Schundler refused to resign in the wake of the controversy over the state’s loss of up to $400 million in federal school funding, two officials briefed on the situation said.

A deputy commissioner will be named acting commissioner while the governor searches for the next person to fill the $141,000-a-year position, the officials said.

Rich Bagger, Christie’s chief of staff, asked Schundler to resign on Thursday evening because he “misled” the governor and senior staff about what happened during a presentation in Washington, D.C., the officials said.

On Wednesday, Christie publicly said Schundler had tried to give the correct information to a bungled question during the presentation, but video from the U.S. Department of Education released Thursday proved that did not happen.

Christie asked Schundler to walk him through the details of the mistake before the governor came out to defend him earlier this week, according to a source.

But after Christie and other top officials on Thursday watched the video of Schundler and other offficials’ presentation to the U.S. Department of Education, and the video contradicted Schundler’s explanation, the governor said, “He can’t lie to me,” the source said.

He directed Bagger to ask for Schundler’s resignation Thursday afternoon, but it took several hours for Bagger to reach the commissioner.

Then, Schundler at first said if the governor wanted his resignation, he would give it, according to the source.

By this morning the resignation had not been received, and word started circulating in Trenton that Schundler was resisting. Christie grew tired of waiting, and ordered Schundler fired, the source said.

The state lost a competitive grant contest for education funding by 3 points. While the state lost points across a number of areas for substantive issues, a blunder on one 5-point question has caused an uproar in Trenton. The state lost 4.8 points by seemingly misreading the question, which asked for information from 2008 and 2009 budgets. The state provided information from 2011.

The error was first reported Tuesday evening by The Star-Ledger. On Wednesday, Christie blamed Washington bureaucrats for their inflexibility to fix what he described as a clerical error. Christie said Schundler had provided the correct information during a presentation of the state’s application in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 11.

But on Thursday, the U.S. Department of Education released a video of that presentation that showed neither Schundler nor the other four people from New Jersey’s delegation were able to come up with the information for the correct budget years.

(Read More: NJ Star Ledger)