“Despite all the reorganization that’s going on, there’s an awareness that IES provides a unique service to the country and we need to consider the next steps,” Northern said.
Severna said she met with 400 people last year and read more than 200 public comments on IES reform, many from research organizations, advocacy groups, and individual researchers.
Researchers generally applauded North’s report. Many of the recommendations reflect public comments on accelerating research and statistical data collection and making them more accessible and useful to schools. In fact, many of the same ideas were in a 2022 Report of the National Academy of Sciences on the future of education research.
“From what we can see, none of the recommendations are new ideas for NCES,” Peggy Carr, former commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, a statistical agency housed at IES, told me in an email. “Many were already implemented or we were working on them when the center was dismantled. Other recommendations were met with implementation challenges, frankly obstacles beyond our control.”
Norther disagreed. “It’s not like I’m trying to reinvent the wheel,” Severin said. “Some of these ideas aren’t unique or new, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do them.” Severna said she had not tracked the progress that had already been made on some reforms or why others had not been implemented.
Not a radical change
It should be noted that Northern’s report does not recommend radical changes such as bringing statistical work in-house, as opposed to the costly practice of outsourcing. That could save money, but it would require hiring more federal employees, an unpopular idea in Congress. (Earlier in her career, Northern worked at Westat, one of the main contractors IES relies on to conduct research, compile statistics and administer assessments.) Nor has Northern proposed sending federal research dollars directly to states, which the Trump administration has proposed for all federal education spending. Northern mentioned the possibility only in an application, noting that it would require authorization from Congress.
“But I’m not holding my breath. I’ve decided to live in the real world,” Severna said, explaining that she’s focusing on the changes IES can make under existing law.
Publicly, though, she and her supporters say her report represents big changes that may be more appealing to the Trump administration, which doesn’t want to be seen as replicating what DOGE destroyed. “These are not pinches and tucks,” Severna wrote in her report.
Some of Northern’s recommendations are technical changes about things like application programming interfaces, or APIs, that allow software to communicate with each other. But others are strategic ideas, such as focusing federal research on a handful of topics rather than scattered research in various fields. She does not suggest what those big themes should be. Northern wants federally funded research to better match states’ educational priorities rather than researchers’ agendas, but did not specify exactly how to achieve that. And she wants states to coordinate and test similar approaches in different settings to see which students benefit.
The Ministry of Education did not answer my questions about which recommendations it might accept and when. Education Department press the statement announcing the release of the report was protected. Acting IES director Matthew Soldner was more enthusiastic at length blog postbut it will need the green light from political appointees to proceed.
Northern expressed optimism that IES would be saved, but would not speculate on details. “None of these things can happen before there’s a redeployment of staff and before there’s a plan,” Severen said. “I’m confident it will happen. But how fast? These are all questions that are still unanswered.”
Mixed signals
The public release of North’s report is itself seen as a positive sign by research advocates. Three people familiar with the report said it took more than two months to review because of administration concerns reflecting the tension between rebuilding parts of the department and the political priority to close it. At the time of the delay, a senior Department of Education official, Lindsay Burke, described IES as “the department’sa jewel in the crown” during an online event in January hosted by news organization Chalkbeat.(Burke, previously a fellow at the Heritage Foundation who wrote the education chapter of Project 2025said in that plan for the Trump administration that the IES’ statistical role should be retained but potentially split between the Census Bureau and the Department of Labor, with educational research going to the National Science Foundation.)
Other signals from the administration are in very different directions. President Trump’s 2026 budget proposes to cut IES’s roughly $800 million budget by two-thirds. The administration then ordered the largest expansion of higher education data collection in history: new college admissions study to enforce the affirmative action ban. “They rely on IES in a lot of 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 data is essential to the field and to their priorities.”
Congress ultimately rejected the proposed cuts and largely kept IES funding. However, the Department of Education has yet to spend the funds Congress appropriated for IES in fiscal year 2025. A Democratic congressional aide said there is “a lot” of unspent money at IES and that the department has not shared a plan for spending it.
Congress begins pressure
Congress demands restoration. A committee report accompanying the 2026 appropriations bill directs the Department of Education to rehire IES staff. However, the staff remains well below the previous level of approximately 200 employees and now stands at 31, according to researchers. The number of employees had dropped to 23 after the mass layoffs, but began to grow again in the fall, largely to administer the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the national report card. Northern’s report did not address canceled projects or staff shortages.
At least one influential observer believes that last year’s destruction creates an opportunity for real reform at IES. Mark Schneider, director of the IES from 2018 to 2024, said in the past it has been difficult to pursue incremental reforms like those proposed in the North report because of bureaucratic resistance. Still, Schneider knows that any recovery will be a political challenge. “It’s going to take a lot of pressure,” he said.
As the debate continues, the patient may slip away. In a blog post last week Chester E. Finn, Jr., a former Department of Education official in the 1980s and president emeritus at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, warned that the loss of veteran statisticians is already hurting education data.
Without this expertise, we may never get an accurate picture of what is happening in the classroom.
Contact the staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 at Signal, or barshay@hechingerreport.org.
