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.”
