An Attempt to Reconstruct Academic Research After the Cut of the DOGE

“With all the restructuring going on, there is an awareness that IES is doing a unique job in the country, and we need to think about its next steps,” Northern said.

Northern said he met with 400 people last year and read more than 200 public comments about reforming the IES, many of them from research organizations, advocacy groups and individual researchers.

Researchers generally applauded North’s report. Many of the recommendations echo the public’s ideas to speed up research and data collection and make it more accessible and useful in schools. Indeed, many of the same ideas were present in the National Academy of Sciences’ 2022 report on the future of educational research.

“From what we can see, none of the recommendations were new ideas to NCES,” Peggy Carr, former commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, the statistical agency housed within IES, told me by email. “Many of them had already been implemented or were still working when the institution was dissolved. Some recommendations were met with challenges in implementing them, which are obstacles that we did not manage.”

Northern did not agree. “It’s not like I’m trying to reinvent the wheel,” Northern said. “Some of these ideas are not unique or new, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do them.” Northern said he did not follow the progress made on some changes or why others have not been made.

It’s not a big change

It is worth noting that North’s report did not recommend major changes, such as bringing accounting work in-house, contrary to its costly practice of relying on outside contractors. That would save money but would require hiring more government workers, an idea unpopular with Congress. (Earlier in his career, North worked at Westat, one of the main contractors IES relies on to conduct research, produce statistics and administer assessments.) And North did not propose sending federal research dollars directly to states, which the Trump administration has proposed for all federal education spending. Northern mentioned this possibility only in the appendix, noting that it would require congressional approval.

“But I’m not holding my breath. I decided to live in the real world,” said Northern, explaining that he is focused on the changes that IES can make under existing laws.

Publicly, however, he and his supporters say his report represents a major shift, one that may be more palatable to the Trump administration who doesn’t want to be seen as an exact reproduction of what DOGE scrapped. “These are not nips and tucks,” Northern wrote in his report.

Some of North’s recommendations are technical changes around things like Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs, which allow software to communicate with each other. But some strategic ideas, such as focusing organizational research on a few topics rather than scattershot studies in various areas. He does not suggest what those major topics should be. Northern wants federally funded research to be more responsive to states’ educational policies, not researchers’ agendas, but did not specify how that would be accomplished. And he wants states to coordinate and test similar methods in different settings to see which students benefit.

The Department of Education did not respond to my questions about which recommendations to use and when. A press release from the Department of Education announces the release of the surveillance report. IES acting director Matthew Soldner has been enthusiastic about the long blog post, but will need the green light from political appointees to proceed.

Northern expressed hope that IES would be saved, but would not speculate on specifics. “None of these things can happen until the workers are restarted and there is a plan first,” said Northern. “I hope this will happen. But how soon? Those are all unanswered questions.”

Mixed signals

The public release of North’s report was also seen as a positive sign by research advocates. Three people familiar with the report said it took more than two months to review it because of concerns within the administration, reflecting the tension between rebuilding parts of the department and the politics of shutting it down. During the delay, Department of Education chief executive Lindsey Burke described IES as the department’s “jewel in the crown” during an online event in January hosted by news organization Chalkbeat. (Burke, a former Heritage Foundation fellow who wrote the education chapter of Project 2025, said in that draft of the Trump administration that the IES’ statistical role should be kept but could be split between the Census Bureau and the Department of Labor, with education research going to the National Science Foundation.)

Some signals come from the management environment in many different ways. President Trump’s 2026 budget proposed cutting IES’s roughly $800 million budget by two-thirds. Then, the administration ordered the largest expansion of higher education data collection in history: a new college admissions survey to enforce a ban on affirmative action. “They depend on IES in many ways,” said Diane Cheng, vice president of policy at the Institute for Higher Education Policy, a nonprofit that advocates for increasing college access and improving graduation rates. “They seem to recognize that information is important to the field and their priorities.”

Congress ultimately rejected the proposed cuts and largely maintained funding for IES. However, the Department of Education has not spent the money Congress appropriated for IES for the 2025 fiscal year. A Democratic Alliance congressional aide said there is “a lot of money” that has not been spent at IES and that the department has not shared a plan to spend it.

Congress is starting to push

Congress is committed to reconstruction. A committee report accompanying the 2026 appropriations bill directs the Department of Education to rehire employees from IES. However, the workforce remains well below the previous level of about 200 workers and now stands at 31, according to researchers. The number of taxpayers dropped to 23 after the mass shooting but began to rise in the fall, mainly to administer the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the National Report Card. The Northern report does not mention canceled projects or labor shortages.

At least one influential observer believes that last year’s devastation creates an opportunity for real change at IES. Mark Schneider, director of the IES from 2018 to 2024, said it has been difficult in the past to make incremental changes like those proposed in the North report because of resistance from officials. Still, Schneider knows that any rebuilding will be politically challenging. “It will take a lot of pressure,” he said.

As the argument progresses, the patient may slip. In a blog post last week, Chester E. Finn, Jr., a former Department of Education official in the 1980s and former president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, warned that the loss of a veteran statistician is a discredit to education data.

Without that technology, we may never get an accurate picture of what is happening in the classroom.

Contact a staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 at Signal, or barshay@hechingerreport.org.