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.

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 going to just fire my accountant because I can’t control my spending.’”

‘The most painful example’

Much of the data terminated by Doge were longitudinal studies – studies that follow individual students for a period of time and allow researchers to see the effects of specific policies and understand the reasons behind trends such as declining reading scores.

For Peggy Carr, the former NCES commissioner, who was abruptly fired last spring after nearly four decades at the agency, “probably the most painful example” was the termination of the Early childhood longitudinal study (ECLS).

The ECLS followed thousands of students across the country from kindergarten through fifth grade, evaluated their academic achievement and surveyed their parents, teachers and school administrators.

Last winter, Doge canceled the $47m contract in the middle of the third iteration of the survey, which occurs roughly every decade. The study contractor, Westat, was preparing to follow up with a group of the 15,000 first graders it had surveyed in the fall of 2023, when the students were entering kindergarten, when the funding was suddenly cut.

This would have been the first survey of kids born after Covid, and included new questions tailored to understanding the effects of the pandemic, such as childcare arrangements and hybrid in-person and online instruction.

“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 because we’re not able to follow these children into the future,” Carr said.

Since it started in 1998, the ECLS has been cited in nearly 3,000 academic papers, including research on how early reading is a predictor of reading skill in later grades, the importance of developing executive function skills and the effects of full-day versus half-day kindergarten on reading and math learning.

“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?” said Daphna Bassok, a professor at the University of Virginia who studies the outcomes of early childhood education policies.

In addition to the loss of data for research, advocates say the Trump administration’s cuts to education data let years of work and millions of government dollars go to waste.

Some longitudinal studies were canceled in the final years of data collection. That happened with the beginning postsecondary students (BPS) longitudinal study 20-25, which tracked more than 30,000 students who started college in the fall of 2019 through 2025, and the high school longitudinal study of 2009, which followed 23,000 ninth graders who started in 2009 all the way into their early 30s.

“These cuts were wasteful and didn’t really save taxpayer money because most of that work had already been done,” said Diane Cheng, vice-president for policy at the Institute for Higher Education Policy.

The education department also needed to pay several million-dollar termination fees to contractors. A large portion of funding was spent upfront even for studies that had just gotten off the ground, such as the ECLS.

“There’s a huge amount spent on development, like just setting up the sample, reaching out to the schools, reaching out to the families, the states, getting participation, setting up the questionnaires,” said one person familiar with the process. “All of that had to be done before any data was collected.”

Multiple groups, including Cheng’s, have since filed several lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s cuts to funding and staffing for education data and research, part of a wave of broader outcry from researchers, advocates, teachers and parents to the administration’s goal to completely eliminate the US Department of Education.

Since then, several NCES data collections have been reinstated, including the national postsecondary student aid survey, which is the primary way researchers know how students pay for college, and the baccalaureate and beyond longitudinal study, which measures outcomes of bachelor’s degree graduates for 10 years.

“We know that advocacy and litigation create important public pressure for the department to rethink its decisions and move forward with data collections that it canceled,” Cheng said.

The Guardian’s Deleted data series explores how critical US government information is being deleted and what the consequences will be, and will preserve or recreate lost datasets. If you know about any datasets, webpages or government materials that have been deleted or altered in the past year, or are willing to share how those changes affect you, we would love to hear from you. Please reach out at [email protected].