BALTIMORE – The National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), a federal agency that has functioned as the “backbone for education statistics” in the U.S. and is perhaps best known for putting out annual reading and math score data known as The Nation’s Report Card, is in need of rebuilding.
Peggy Carr, who was appointed by President Joe Biden in 2021 to serve a six-year term as commissioner of NCES but was unprecedently pushed out soon after the inauguration of President Donald Trump in 2025, spoke at the Education Writers of America conference Thursday about the state of the agency following massive changes at the hands of the now-disbanded Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). 
Dr. Peggy Carr's six-year term, intended to shield the National Center for Education Statistics commissioner from partisanship, abruptly ended following DOGE recommendations.
“Data quality, this is something I've worried about,” Carr said
Carr said she has seen “evidence” that the quality of some recent data from the agency is “not what it should be,” and said she was worried about the loss of “institutional memory” at NCES and knowledge of how to manage education data.
Her remarks come more than a year after the Trump administration cancelled nearly $900 million in contracts at the Institute of Education Sciences, or IES, in February 2025. The contract cancellations were followed the next month by staff cuts that left NCES with a “skeletal staff” of three, down from the nearly 100 it had prior to the cuts.
Amber Northern, who was commissioned by the Trump administration to author a report on how to “reimagine” IES, told the education writers that IES “had too many topics that it was trying to cover.”
“I think it was trying to be too comprehensive in what it was trying to do,” Northern said. “And I had empathy for that because it had a big mission.”
But she said instead of tackling a dozen or so topics, IES would be better off concentrating on three to five subjects that are of interest to states, such as early literacy and preparing students for success in college and the workforce.
“I think that's sort of commonsensical,” Northern said. “That means we're not going to do a lot of things, but we're going to do a few things. And those few things are going to be what a lot of states are wrestling with.”
Northern also reiterated her report’s finding that IES should prioritize multi-state grants to find effective educational interventions and policies, instead of individual or project-specific grants within a single state.
Northern said she didn’t think any of the recommendations made in her report could be implemented until leadership of IES is “solidified.”
Asked if she thought that would happen under the Trump administration, Northern said her sense is that the administration is “taking time and trying to be thoughtful” about how the agency will operate with other federal agencies in the future.
The panelists agreed that IES cannot be rebuilt based on current funding proposals. President Trump’s fiscal year 2027 budget request is seeking a 67 percent, or $531 million, cut to IES. A House appropriations bill released Thursday seeks $493 million, a fraction of its current $790 million for fiscal year 2026.
“There will be data collections (and) activities that will not happen,” Carr said. “So some hard decisions are going to have to be made about cutting back on these program activities in the scope of the depth.”
Northern said some “tension” remains among the Trump administration concerning the idea that many research grants are too left-leaning or ideological and pushing DEI initiatives, the administration has been seeking to root out.
Asked if she had found any evidence of research leaning left, Northern said: “When you look at the number of grants that IES was getting out, you're going to be able to say, ‘Oh, there's some cultural pedagogy, something or other in there that somebody could call DEI. I do think there's some of that. If they're looking for it, they're gonna find it. There are a handful of grants that sort of have those buzzwords in it.”
“But for the most part, what I saw was not that way. It was much more about rigorous research, answering questions that people actually care about,” she said, adding that whether or not research was translated in a way that people could understand was a separate question.
“I do think that there’s a problem, that a lot of folks think that research has sort of gone left-leaning, but I also don't think that it’s the job of IES ... to try to fix that perception,” Northern said. “Their job is to continue, conduct and release high-quality research.”
