When President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency set out to slash billions from the federal budget, it puzzled me as to why one of their first targets was an obscure data collection and research agency, the Institute of Education Sciences, a relatively modest operation buried deeply in the corridors of the Department of Education, and indeed one few had ever heard of. Since then, the newly installed secretary of education has ordered a review of all the department’s functions as part of what she ominously called the department’s “momentous final mission.”
A conversation with a trusted colleague helped me understand the cuts to IES, noting that the action should be seen as part of a new breed of autocrats around the world who seek to control information to hide the impacts of their actions from the public. In contemporary authoritarian governments, control of information—or what has come to be known today as informational autocracy—often substitutes for brute force.
Similar to how the Trump administration is seizing control of the White House press pool, canceling contracts for independent, high-quality education research is another way of controlling information. As Democratic lawmakers wrote in a Feb. 21 letter decrying the cuts, “The consequences of these actions will prevent the public from accessing accurate information about student demographics and academic achievement, abruptly end evaluations of federal programs that ensure taxpayer funds are spent wisely, and set back efforts to implement evidence-based reforms to improve student outcomes.”
IES houses a vast warehouse of the nation’s education statistics. Data collected by the agency is used by policymakers, researchers, teachers and colleges to understand student achievement, enrollment and much more about the state of American education. With IES being among the largest funders of education research, cutting it limits public access to what’s happening in the nation’s schools and colleges.
Claiming to eliminate waste and corruption, Musk’s first round of cuts involved canceling what DOGE initially said were nearly $900 million in IES contracts (though, as subsequent reporting has since revealed, DOGE’s math doesn’t add up and the canceled contracts seem to amount to much less). A second round purportedly sliced another $350 million in contracts and grants. It’s unclear how much more is destined to be chopped, since these may only be the first in a series of cuts designed to completely dismantle the Education Department. Though a department spokesperson initially said that the cuts would not affect the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a standardized test known as the nation’s report card, and the College Scorecard, which allows citizens to search for and compare information about colleges, we’ve since seen the cancellation of a national NAEP test for 17-year-olds.
In the Obama years, public data helped reveal bad actors among for-profit colleges, which were receiving millions in federal aid while delivering inferior education to poor and working-class students who yearned for college degrees. Since so few actually completed, what many got instead was crushing college debt. Luckily, good data helped drive nearly half of all for-profit programs to shut down. Publicly disseminated data exposes where things go wrong. But you can’t track down con men without evidence.
Ideally, in a well-functioning democracy, with a richly informed public, data helps us reach informed decisions, leading to greater accountability and enabling us to hold officials responsible for their actions. With access to reliable information about what’s happening behind closed doors, data helps us understand what may be going on, even to protest actions we may oppose.
Lately, however, things aren’t looking good. Since Trump and his top officials have slashed race-conscious programs and moved to prohibit funding for certain areas of research, higher ed leadership has remained mostly silent, with only a handful of college presidents protesting. Most have shrunk into the wings, cowed by Trump’s power to defund institutions. It already has the eerie feeling of watching your step.
Shutting down potentially revealing data collection is perhaps the least worrisome page in an autocrat’s playbook. As Trump continues to follow the authoritarian path set by leaders in Hungary, Turkey and elsewhere, we should expect other, more damaging and more frightening higher ed moves that have been imposed by other autocrats—selecting college presidents, controlling faculty hiring and advancement, punishing academic dissent, imposing travel restrictions.
Just a few months ago, there was comfort in knowing everything was there—data on enrollments, graduation rates, participation rates of women and other groups. All very neatly organized and accessible whenever you wanted. Even though some found IES technology old and clunky, it felt like higher ed was running according to a reliable scheme, that you could go online and open data files as in a railroad timetable. Without it, there might be a train wreck ahead and you wouldn’t know it until it was too late. Now these luxurious numbers may soon be lost, with decades of America’s academic history pitched into digital darkness.
It’s frightening to realize that we’ll no longer be operating on solid intelligence. That we’ll no longer have guideposts, supported by racks of sensibly collected numbers to tell us if we’re on the right path or if we’re far afield. Trump’s wrecking ball has smashed our confidence, a confidence built on years of reliable data. We’ll soon be in the dark.
