The Trump administration has significantly reduced the United States’ capacity to track educational performance, coinciding with a sharp decline in student test scores across the country. Recent international data confirms that American 15-year-olds have recorded their lowest results in maths and reading in over two decades.
The 2026 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results, released in mid-September, revealed a 14-point plunge in US reading scores compared to 2022. The decline follows a series of federal policy shifts that have seen the US Department of Education terminate nearly $900 million (£715 million) in research and statistics contracts since early 2025.
Data infrastructure dismantled
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the primary federal entity for collecting and analysing education data in the US, has been at the centre of the staffing reductions.
Much of the reduction was driven by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an advisory body that recommended widespread contract cancellations. Although DOGE was officially dissolved in July 2026 and its functions absorbed by the Office of Personnel Management, the impact on federal data collection remains profound.
According to research from ProPublica, the administration utilised executive orders to implement “efficiency” cuts, bypassing Congress to terminate research grants and contracts “for convenience”.
Impact on student tracking
The cancellation of these contracts has left significant gaps in the tracking of school safety, student debt, and literacy interventions. Domestic policy experts have noted that the “Nation’s Report Card”—officially known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—has been effectively hindered by the lack of administrative support.
Between 2024 and 2026, approximately 50% of the total Department of Education workforce was either cut or left the department. This mass departure was accelerated by a “deferred resignation” programme, which saw nearly 140,000 federal workers across various US government departments leave their posts during that two-year period.
While the Department of Education initially claimed that key assessment programmes were unaffected, the American Statistical Association has suggested that federal data collection has been effectively dismantled. This reduction in data capacity complicates the ability of individual US states to formulate evidence-based policy, as many rely on federal research to gauge local performance against national standards.
For international observers, including education officials in the UK, the decline in reliable US data may impact global benchmarks. If the primary federal agency for educational statistics remains understaffed, future international comparisons through programmes like PISA may become increasingly difficult to verify against domestic US metrics.