Former Trump Commissioner Blasts DOGE Education Data Cuts

The National Center for Education Statistics is a relatively obscure federal agency, but its mission – to collect data on the state of education – affects every public school in the country. Now, this work is under threat because of cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE. And that alarms a former Trump appointee who ran the statistics unit and fears it will become politicized.

“You’re talking about millions of dollars worth of investment just vanishing because someone canceled a contract too early without knowing what they were doing,” said James (Lynn) Woodworth, who served as the commissioner of the agency, known by the acronym NCES, from 2018 to 2021.

Congress mandates a June 1 NCES report on the condition of education. This year, it’s not clear how much fresh data will still exist.

Vital data collections have been canceled. Historical data could be lost. And there’s a looming threat of future political tampering. Woodworth says that policymakers and the public would be operating in the dark without basic data on student achievement, enrollment, poverty and school finances. In an interview last week from his home in Arkansas, he also said he worries about how sensitive student data could be mishandled in the wake of the abrupt contract terminations.

“The data belongs to the people,” Woodworth said. “It doesn’t belong to the president. It belongs to the public. It is a public asset.”

Woodworth built his research career documenting the benefits of charter schools and is now a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank at Stanford University. “There are things that the Department of Education does that probably should be better left to the states, or, quite frankly, the federal government shouldn’t be involved in,” he said. “But NCES existed for over 100 years before the Department of Education was ever founded because one of the legitimate purposes of the federal government in education is collecting data so that people can see how schools are doing. We need to make data-driven decisions.”

Removal of commissioner ‘disturbing’

Woodworth also decried the unexplained and sudden removal last week of his successor, Peggy Carr, a Biden appointee whose congressionally determined six-year term was supposed to extend through 2027. He called her departure a “disturbing development.” The Trump administration put Carr, a 30-year career NCES employee, on paid administrative leave, and named Chris Chapman acting commissioner. (Reached last week, Carr said she didn’t want to comment now on her dismissal.)

The American Statistical Association’s executive director, Ron Wasserstein, said Carr’s removal would undermine public trust in education statistics. “Removing the head of a statistical agency without justifiable professional cause is likely to erode this trust, as it will be perceived by many as an attempt to improperly influence official statistics or as a signal of distrust in the agency itself,” he wrote on LinkedIn last week.

Those fears are well-founded. Woodworth recounted instances when he was able to resist political pressures from both the Trump and the Biden administrations. Trump officials, he said, wanted him to say that U.S. academic performance was worse than reported on international tests. “They wanted to use a different number,” Woodworth said, “because they were arguing that the education system was failing.” He also said that Biden administration officials asked him to generate a statistic for Jan. 19, 2021, the day before Biden took office. “We had estimates for how many schools were operating in January,” Woodworth said. “But wanting to know the exact number on that particular date screamed of political use.” Although Woodworth was able to hold out against those demands, he worries that with Carr’s removal, the political insulation he once enjoyed is gone.

‘Congress needs to speak up’

“Congress needs to speak up,” said Woodworth. “Congress requires these data points to be collected…Do you not feel those are worth collecting? You’re allowing them to be dropped essentially.”

Woodworth called upon Congress to take action to preserve the nation’s data infrastructure, which includes not only NCES but also 12 other principal statistical agencies that collect everything from unemployment statistics to airline travel. Woodworth thinks Congress should set up a federal statistics agency under its aegis so data can’t be removed or distorted by the president.

“Even though Mr. Trump might not not be interested in a particular data point,” he said, “the next administration may really need it to put their policies in place. That’s why the statistical system is supposed to be apolitical.”

Unlike other statistical agencies in the federal government, such as the Census Bureau or the Bureau of Labor Statistics, NCES does not have many statisticians on staff. That is because congressional appropriation rules limit the hiring of full-time staff at the Education Department and require that most of NCES’s budget be spent externally. Woodworth estimates that 90 percent of its data gathering and reporting work is contracted out to private firms and organizations. Even some of its websites with .gov domains are actually maintained by outside contractors. Woodworth also said that NCES does not operate its own facility to hold all the data. Instead, the federal government pays the same private research organizations to keep it in their data centers.

“I’ve been arguing for a long time that the biggest bang for the buck is to actually hire more federal staff and stop using so many contractors,” Woodworth said. Outside contractors are not only paid more than federal workers, but the contract payments also include overhead costs for office space and employee benefits and a profit margin. That makes them a prime target for cost-cutting.

With DOGE’s contract cancellations, the duties of maintaining historical data and making data available to the public were canceled along with the collection of new data. “We don’t really know for sure what’s going to happen to that data,” Woodworth said.

Archiving and crowdsourcing data

Researchers at the private research organizations have been describing internal efforts to rapidly archive data. Although many statistics are still publicly available and can be downloaded from Department of Education websites, researchers also hope to protect the original raw data that has not been redacted for student privacy. It’s not clear what will happen to this information.

There are some informal, uncoordinated efforts to preserve public data in the event that open access disappears. DataLumos, a free, open-access data archive at the University of Michigan, is one such crowdsourcing site. In February, researchers uploaded data files dating back to 1968 from the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights along with a vast trove of basic education data called ED Data Express. It includes figures since 2010 on student enrollment, teachers, school funding, absenteeism, graduation, homeless students and more.

Private research organizations are expected to begin mass layoffs of education statisticians now that a lot of their work has been terminated. That could mean a loss of expertise and institutional knowledge in how to collect the nation’s school data.

Woodworth is especially concerned about the cancellation of a widely used dataset called the Common Core of Data, which includes figures on student enrollment by grade, gender, income, race and ethnicity and geography. The poverty and enrollment rates in this dataset are used to calculate the distribution of roughly $16 billion in federal Title I funding for low-income children.

Losing that data also means that it will be impossible to assemble a nationally representative sample of students for research purposes or for taking the next National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a congressionally mandated test known as the nation’s report card.

NAEP was initially spared from the first round of cuts on Feb. 10. But NAEP includes a large basket of assessments, and nine days later, on Feb. 19, the Education Department canceled a contract to administer one of the NAEP tests, a long-term trend assessment of 17-year-olds that hasn’t been administered since 2012. The law says this particular assessment needs to be administered periodically, but doesn’t specify the period.

About that $1.4 million mailroom contract

Both DOGE and the Department of Education touted on X that they had terminated a seemingly absurd contract for $1.4 million to observe mailing and clerical operations at a mail center. Woodworth explained that this contract was necessary because NCES doesn’t have its own mail center to distribute an array of questionnaires along with cash incentive payments to families and teachers to fill them out. It had to use the Census Department’s mail room. “You actually do have to have someone over there to make sure that the forms are being handled properly and no one is exposing data,” said Woodworth.

DOGE staffers have not publicly disclosed how they decided which data to cut and which to preserve. Indeed, neither DOGE nor the Education Department has yet to disclose or confirm a list of the cuts. The Education Department press office did not respond to my inquiries.

Woodworth said he has been told that DOGE staffers entered the Department of Education and required NCES staff to match every data collection or task to a line in the law. If the data collection was mentioned by name, that dataset was more likely to be saved. The Higher Education Act specifically refers to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), a collection of data from universities and colleges, and it was spared. But the Education Sciences Reform Act more generally describes the kind of data that NCES should collect without mentioning official names of datasets. Many of those data collections were canceled. If DOGE’s goal had been to avoid running afoul of congressional laws, it apparently did not succeed. The Knowledge Alliance, an advocacy organization for private research organizations, identified seven data collections and research activities that DOGE cut at the Education Department despite being codified into law by Congress.

Project 2025, a blueprint that conservatives wrote for Trump before he took office, calls for the elimination of the Department of Education. But it also states that statistics gathering is a valuable function that the federal government should “confine” itself to in education policy. So far, it looks like this is one case where the Trump administration isn’t following the script.

This story about education data was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.