Jill Barshay:

Unlike other statistical agencies in the federal government, such as the Census Bureau or the Bureau of Labor Statistics, NCES does not have many statisticians on staff. That is because congressional appropriation rules limit the hiring of full-time staff at the Education Department and require that most of NCES’s budget be spent externally. Woodworth estimates that 90 percent of its data gathering and reporting work is contracted out to private firms and organizations. Even some of its websites with .gov domains are actually maintained by outside contractors. Woodworth also said that NCES does not operate its own facility to hold all the data. Instead, the federal government pays the same private research organizations to keep it in their data centers. 

“I’ve been arguing for a long time that the biggest bang for the buck is to actually hire more federal staff and stop using so many contractors,” Woodworth said. Outside contractors are not only paid more than federal workers, but the contract payments also include overhead costs for office space and employee benefits and a profit margin. That makes them a prime target for cost-cutting. 

With DOGE’s contract cancellations, the duties of maintaining historical data and making data available to the public were canceled along with the collection of new data. “We don’t really know for sure what’s going to happen to that data,” Woodworth said.