Scores Hit 25-Year Low. Trump Axed the Agency That Explains Why.

Ninety-Six People Gone, $900 Million in Contracts Canceled

The National Center for Education Statistics has existed quietly for decades, doing the kind of unglamorous, essential work that nobody thinks about until it's gone. It ran The Nation's Report Card. It tracked guns and violence in schools. It followed tens of thousands of kids from kindergarten through college to understand what was actually working in American education. According to the Guardian, it had about 100 employees.

Then DOGE arrived. The Trump administration fired nearly half the Department of Education's workforce and allowed DOGE to cancel nearly $900 million in contracts. NCES got hit so hard it functionally ceased to exist. The headcount cratered from roughly 100 to four. Some staff were clawed back, and the agency now operates with 12 people, according to its own website.

Twelve. For an agency tasked with measuring the educational outcomes of tens of millions of American children across every school district in the country. The Department of Education, per the Guardian, did not answer questions about how many data collections have been permanently terminated.

A $47 Million Study of Pandemic Kids, Killed Halfway Through

Here is a specific number to hold in your head: 15,000. That's how many first graders had already been surveyed as part of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study when DOGE canceled its $47 million contract in the middle of winter. The contractor, Westat, was preparing to follow up with those same kids as they moved into first and third grade.

This wasn't an abstract research project. As the Guardian reports, these were the first children born after Covid, and the study included new questions specifically designed to understand pandemic effects on learning, like childcare disruptions and hybrid schooling. Former NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr, who was fired after nearly four decades at the agency, called it "probably the most painful example." Her words: "We were going to study them into their first and third grade years to see how the pandemic influenced their development and their learning, but now we'll never know."

Since 1998, that same longitudinal study had been cited in nearly 3,000 academic papers. Research on how early reading predicts later literacy. Research on executive function development. Research on full-day versus half-day kindergarten. All of that institutional knowledge, that infrastructure, that pipeline of future understanding, gone. The kids are still out there. The data about them is not.

Millions in Work Already Done, Thrown in the Trash

The cruelty of some of these cuts is almost architectural in its precision. Several longitudinal studies were not canceled at the beginning of a cycle, when the loss would be containable. They were canceled in the final years of data collection, according to the Guardian's reporting, meaning years of fieldwork and millions in government dollars produced findings that will now never be analyzed or published.

The Beginning Postsecondary Students longitudinal study, which tracked more than 30,000 students who started college in fall 2019, is one such case. The work was done. The data was sitting there. And then funding was cut before the results could be compiled into anything usable. It's the research equivalent of building a house, finishing every room, and then burning it down before anyone moves in.

Daphna Bassok, a professor at the University of Virginia who studies early childhood education policy, put it plainly to the Guardian: "We as a country made huge investments in early childhood and we have all sorts of policies that get rolled out around introducing preschool, or Head Start, or different early interventions, and we basically don't have a tool with which to say, OK, and to what extent did that work?"

The Administration's Response: 'Reform Is Underway'

Education Department spokesperson Savannah Newhouse told the Guardian that the Institute of Education Sciences, which oversees NCES, is "still collecting some data," including The Nation's Report Card. She also said that "NCES and IES were in need of reform, and that work is well underway."

Reform. That's the word they're using. Reducing a 100-person statistical agency to 12 people while canceling nearly $900 million in research contracts during the worst academic performance crisis in a generation is, in this framing, reform.

Carolyn Grim, who spent 15 years at NCES as an education statistician before retiring early in 2025 and now runs a nonprofit called Agora Education Research, offered a different framing to the Guardian: "Dismantling a statistical agency is just shooting the messenger. It makes no more sense than saying: 'I'm going to just fire my accountant because I can't control my spending.'" That analogy is funny. It is also exactly right.

The Scores That Launched This Crisis

Let's not lose the thread here. The reason any of this matters right now is that US math and reading scores have just hit their lowest point in 25 years, as the Guardian reports. A quarter-century of educational progress, gone. And the administration's response to that crisis has been to eliminate the primary federal infrastructure for understanding what caused it and what might fix it.

The Nation's Report Card still technically exists, the administration assures us. But the longitudinal studies that would tell researchers why scores are falling, which interventions work, which populations are most affected, and what early childhood factors predict later academic outcomes are either canceled, dormant, or reduced to shadows of their former scope. You can still see the bleeding. You just no longer have the instruments to diagnose it.