Illustration: Guardian Design/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Illustration: Guardian Design/Getty Images Deleted data US education Trump administration guts data collection on US education as math and reading scores plummet National Center for Education Statistics, which collects critical data to guide policy on learning, was decimated after Doge canceled crucial contracts
About this content Amy Qin with graphics by Flávio Pessoa Fri 25 Sep 2026 17.00 CEST Last modified on Fri 25 Sep 2026 19.10 CEST Share As reading and math scores fall to their lowest point in the past quarter-century, the US now has fewer tools to understand and develop interventions for this troubling trend.
When the Trump administration took a wrecking ball to the Department of Education last year, firing nearly half of its workers and allowing the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to cancel nearly $900m in contracts, a little-known agency called the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) was among the hardest hit.
NCES, a federal statistical agency, has for decades collected critical data on the state of education in America, including The Nation’s Report Card , an assessment of what students know across math, reading, writing, science and history. NCES data also helps set US education policy and allocate funding for school districts.
But nearly all of the statistical agency’s work was abruptly terminated and its headcount dropped from about 100 to four. Some were rehired; NCES now has 12 staffers, according to the agency’s website .
The cuts, which are part of the administration’s broader attack on taxpayer-funded data and research that don’t align with the president’s priorities, have hamstrung the historically under-resourced agency’s ability to collect and report on a range of data on K-12 and college students. These include surveys on the prevalence of guns and violence at middle and high schools and studies on how students are paying for college , former NCES employees say.
Read more Now, most of the agency’s ongoing data collections and reports appear to be inactive or reduced in scope, according to a tracker , based on publicly available information, published by the American Statistical Association. (The education department did not answer the Guardian’s questions about how many data collections have been terminated.)
Savannah Newhouse, an education department spokesperson, said in a statement to the Guardian that the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the research and statistics arm of the education department that NCES is part of, is still collecting some data, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress , known as The Nation’s Report Card.
“The Trump administration is committed to ensuring that IES delivers usable, high-quality statistics, data and resources for educators, researchers and other stakeholders,” she wrote. “NCES and IES were in need of reform – and that work is well underway.”
But researchers and advocates say the cuts to NCES are coming at a time when it’s more critical than ever to have an objective measure of how American students are doing given the decline in math and literacy.
“Dismantling a statistical agency is just shooting the messenger,” said Carolyn Grim, who spent 15 years at NCES as an education statistician before retiring early in 2025. She’s now founder and executive director of the non-profit Agora Education Research. “It makes no more sense than saying: ‘I’m…