For the people who worked there, the weeks before the purge of the Education Department’s statistics and research arm were a blur of apprehension and confusion.
More than 160 contracts measuring educational progress across the nation’s schools and colleges were suddenly halted. Probationary workers were fired, employees were blocked from accessing information on their computers, and a national center that dates to the time of Abraham Lincoln was effectively decommissioned overnight.
Employees worked late into the evenings downloading data that had taken decades to compile, according to interviews with more than a dozen people fired from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), an independent and nonpartisan agency within the U.S. Department of Education, and its National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). They worried that websites might suddenly go dark, purging information that researchers, policymakers, and educators rely on to measure student progress. As the Trump administration dangled offers urging them to voluntarily resign — sometimes with only a few days to decide — employees consulted with lawyers and made hurried calculations about the risks of staying on in positions that seemed more precarious by the day.
IES, which had 173 employees before the cuts, was left with just over a dozen after Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency swept through the Education Department early last month. The crippling of the office was so swift and haphazard that it left serious doubts about how much of the educational data that has informed higher-education policy and practice will continue to be available.
Despite Trump’s campaign to eliminate the Education Department — which ramped up last week with his executive order instructing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to begin shutting it down — the administration left a skeletal form of the institute standing because Congress requires some of the studies it oversees. The department, created by a 1979 law, can only be entirely closed by an act of Congress.
Since 1969, the statistics center has issued the National Assessment of Educational Progress, widely known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” which informs the public about what American students know in various subject areas across all 50 states. Its 2024 report found that K-12 students were continuing to struggle in both reading and math, and that learning loss from the pandemic remains a serious problem. The findings have troubling implications for the nation’s colleges, where faculty members report that students are less able and willing to read and that many still struggle with basic math.
Instead of interpreting the data as a reason to double down on its work, the Education Department used the bleak findings to explain why it was cutting the vast majority of IES employees and nearly half of the Department of Education’s employees. The NCES shrank from more than 100 employees to three, according to administrators who were fired this month.
Madi Biedermann, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, wrote in a March 14 email to The Chronicle that IES hadn’t done enough to improve the quality of the nation’s education.
“Despite spending hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds annually, IES has failed to effectively fulfill its mandate to identify best practices and new approaches that improve educational outcomes and close achievement gaps for students,” she wrote.
“Over the coming months, IES will be restructured with input from existing leadership and expert stakeholders so that the institute provides states with more useful data to improve student outcomes while maintaining rigorous scientific integrity and cost effectiveness.”
That was written before Trump signed the executive order signaling his desire to close down the Education Department, so it’s unclear whether any restructuring is now planned.
Biedermann wrote that none of the IES employees who were cut conducted research on the College Scorecard, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, commonly known as IPEDS. The work on those key tools, she said, is all done through contracts that the department still maintains.
Fired IES staff members, who asked not to be identified, disputed that, saying that nearly all of the federal employees working to support and help disseminate the results of those studies were cut. Working closely with contractors who were gathering the data, these federal employees helped ensure that the information was comprehensive, clearly presented, and conveyed to the public and to policymakers, they said. Data from the Nation’s Report Card, for instance, informed new teaching methods that significantly increased reading scores in Mississippi.
“These cuts that come close to zeroing out NCES are just insanely destructive,” Jordan Matsudaira, a professor of public policy at American University, said in an interview. He was a deputy undersecretary of education in the Biden administration and served as the Education Department’s first chief economist.
“There’s no plan in place as I understand it for how those different pieces of data and surveys are going to be administered going forward. We’re just kneecapping our ability to understand the impact policies might have” on educational outcomes. The moves, Matsudaira said, are “breathtakingly irresponsible.”
Take, for example, one of the many tools in the acronym-filled menu of reports the National Center for Education Statistics publishes: the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study. It sheds light on how students pay for college and how those choices affect future outcomes. That data will be crucial, Matsudaira said, as the U.S. House considers a measure that would limit the amount of money students and families could borrow for college. The proposed legislation, aimed at protecting people from crippling debt, could make it harder for some to pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees. Finding the right balance — protecting people from debt without setting loan limits so low they close the doors to college — requires the kind of data whose future is now in jeopardy, Matsudaira said.
It’s going to take so many years to catch up if we lose this data — more time, more money, more effort to bring it back.
“Disinformation misled so many otherwise intelligent people into believing that the agency itself was the problem,” Sheida White, who spent 25 years as a researcher with NCES before becoming a consultant for it in 2018, wrote on LinkedIn. “The real problem? We’ve just lost the most reliable, gold standard, nonpartisan source of information on education in the U.S.”
The national center was created in 1867, two years after Lincoln’s assassination, to help measure the progress of schools across the country and to ensure they were reaching diverse populations, including freed slaves in the South. The center is congressionally mandated to collect data on students’ educational trajectories from pre-kindergarten through work-force training.
“What we were doing — helping people understand the condition of higher education in this country — was really important,” said one fired employee who asked to remain anonymous to avoid retribution. “I’ve gone through feelings of being sad and angry and sad many times and now I’m just kind of confused,” she said. “There’s no logic. It’s going to take so many years to catch up if we lose this data — more time, more money, more effort to bring it back. To me that’s a waste.”
On March 10, the Institute for Higher Education Policy sent a letter to Congress signed by 87 organizations and individual researchers saying the cuts “weaken our capacity to assess and improve educational and economic outcomes for students.” It predicted that “policymakers will soon be forced to make decisions in the dark, unable to steward taxpayer dollars efficiently.”
Staff members with IES, like their counterparts across the Education Department and federal government, have lived with constant reminders that their jobs were in jeopardy since Trump took office. On January 28, they were given a choice to resign by February 6 and get paid through September or take the chance of being laid off. A few people who talked to The Chronicle said they declined the offer, one on the advice of a lawyer who was skeptical about whether it would hold up in court, and another by an employee who said he believed too much in his work to quit.
Over the next few weeks, reports were circulating that dozens of young DOGE aides with black backpacks were sweeping through the halls of federal government. A team arrived at the Education Department on February 7 and began interviewing people about their work and poring over records.
We’ve just lost the most reliable, gold standard, nonpartisan source of information on education in the U.S.
On February 10, stop-work orders were issued on more than 160 contracts with IES. The contracts were worth hundreds of millions of dollars and covered a wide range of studies on improving educational quality, some partially or nearly completed before they were dropped.
On February 13, a massive federal-government-wide purge of mostly probationary employees began. A longtime employee described how she checked in with a young woman who was helping her gather data for a project to see how she was coping with the stress of the job threats. Less than two hours later, she said, the woman was unable to log on to the office’s virtual private network. A help-desk employee broke the news to her: The reason was that “today was your offboarding day.”
The senior IES employee, whose own job was eliminated a month later, said she cried at the news of her colleague’s sudden departure. “It’s like you’re on a boat or a train and you see someone just fall off in front of you and you can’t grab their hand,” she said.
Employees grew increasingly worried that they’d lose access to crucial data. “We were panicking,” the IES employee said. “We were saving and downloading the data during the day and in the evenings. We were catching up on the work we lost” because of the interrupted contracts.
On Tuesday, March 11, “We got an email saying that, for security reasons, everyone has to leave the building by 6 that evening and no one can come to the office on Wednesday,” said another fired worker who asked not to be identified.
“I was naïve, thinking this was because of a large-scale protest, but I wasn’t seeing anything on the news about one being planned.”
By midafternoon, the Education Department announced plans to slash its work force. As part of its “final mission,” it was laying off about half its staff, shrinking from around 4,100 workers when Trump took office to about 2,220. That includes about 600 employees who voluntarily resigned or retired.
Employees who worked on reports mandated by Congress were shocked to learn they hadn’t been spared. The emails they received that evening told them their units were being abolished, along with their positions.
Within hours of mass firings across the Education Department, former employees were updating their LinkedIn profiles with “open to work” graphics on their profile pictures. Former colleagues, many with Ph.D.’s and years of experience as statisticians, shared job postings when they learned of them, even though many would be competing in the same pool of positions that had evaporated to a puddle. Education research at both the federal and private levels had been all but obliterated, they feared, forcing some to consider changing careers and possibly uprooting their families.
They seethed at Trump’s published comments that while he felt “very badly” for fired civil servants, many of them “aren’t working” or are “not doing a good job.”
Meanwhile, researchers who’ve relied on IES data said the loss will be widely shared. Marybeth Gasman, a professor of education who serves as executive director of the Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions, said she regularly uses NCES data to tell stories about the importance of minority-serving institutions and to understand disparities in outcomes and resources.
“So many young scholars doing work will be shut down midstream because of this cut,” she said. “And so many long-term projects that are hugely important will end or be interrupted.”
It’s unclear how data from studies will be maintained without the federal employees who’ve managed the contracts. Higher-education researchers are particularly concerned about the future of IPEDS, which gathers enrollment, graduation, financial-aid, and other data from every college and vocational and technical institution that participates in federal financial-aid programs. Even if the data is collected, some researchers worry it will be scaled back or delayed.
Biedermann said that, even at half the size, the Education Department will continue to fulfill the duties assigned by Congress. A lawsuit filed last week by 21 state attorneys general said that was extremely unlikely.
The reduction in force “is so severe and extreme that it incapacitates components of the department responsible for performing functions mandated by statute, effectively nullifying those mandates,” the lawsuit states.
Stephen Provasnik, a former deputy commissioner of NCES , agrees. “There’s no feasible way a statistical agency that had just over 100 staff and is now down to three can produce valid, reliable data with less than a skeletal crew,” he said. “There were thousands of contractors supporting the work NCES did,” and nearly all of those contracts have been canceled.
Blaming the Education Department’s research and statistics arm for problems in the nation’s schools amounts to shooting the messenger, Provasnik suggested. “As a federal statistical center, NCES has no direct role in policymaking or student learning.” But he said he isn’t surprised the administration doesn’t see it that way.
“If you’re an administration that believes you don’t need NOAA to predict when hurricanes are coming, why would you believe you need a statistical center to measure the condition of education in the country and know whether it’s improving or getting worse?”
On March 18, a federal judge in Maryland issued a preliminary injunction in favor of employees and contractors who were fired when DOGE shuttered the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The ruling, which said Musk’s involvement was probably unconstitutional because he was acting as a U.S. officer without being properly appointed one, provided a harsh, detailed assessment of Musk’s conduct. That included his posts on X that he “spent the weekend feeding USAID to the wood chipper” and that it was “time for it to die.”
The ruling didn’t affect the Education Department cuts or the lawsuit filed in that case, but gave its supporters reason for hope by specifically calling out DOGE’s conduct there.
“At the Dept of Education, DOGE reportedly made almost all of the decisions about ‘what grants and contracts to cancel and which employees to put on leave without seeking or considering input from political appointees,’” the judge wrote.
One administrator who oversees a number of canceled Education Department contracts said the attacks on their work have been unfair and demoralizing.
“Many of these statisticians could have been hedge-fund managers, but they went into public service,” said the administrator, who asked not to be identified because she’s worried about retaliation.
Seeing the work many have devoted their lives to devalued this way, she said, has been “completely soul-crushing.”
