The Trump administration’s fiscal year (FY) 2027 budget request for the Education Department’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) takes broad aim at the office’s effectiveness and proposes to cut its annual funding by more than a half billion dollars from the FY 2025 level.
The White House’s budget proposal would provide IES with $261 million for FY 2027, compared to $793 million in FY 2025.
IES functions as the Education Department’s research, statistics and evaluation organization that funds research, collects education data, and evaluates federal education programs from early childhood to adulthood.
As part of those roles, IES houses the National Center for Education Statistics, which collects and reports data on K-12 and postsecondary education, and produces the “Nation’s Report Card”, formally known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP.)
The budget proposal rips into IES’ effectiveness in recent years.
“Over the past decade, IES has not yielded sufficient returns to students on the billions invested in education research and other IES activities as evidenced by the significant decline in NAEP mathematics and reading scores since 201,” the document says. “Teachers and students deserve the best of what education research has to offer translated into practical classroom guides to improve instruction, and ultimately educational achievement.”
To remedy that, the proposal says the Trump administration “is currently finalizing the reimagining of a more efficient, effective, and useful IES to improve support for evidence-based accountability, data-driven decision making, and education research for use in the classroom.”
It adds that the proposed FY 2027 budget “will allow IES leadership to prioritize and streamline activities that focus on academic challenges faced by States and districts with the goal of returning education research and evaluation back to the States.”
It also pledges “continuing support for critical data collections and studies, such as the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System and the Program for International Student Assessment.”
Finally, the budget proposal includes $137 million “to continue support for a modernized, efficient” NAEP and “ National Assessment Governing Board, an independent, bipartisan organization that formulates policy guidelines for NAEP.”
The top-line FY 2027 spending figure proposed for the entire Education Department comes in at $76.5 billion, down 2.9% from the 2026 enacted level.
That figure, the administration said, puts the agency, “which has failed the Nation’s children, teachers, and families, on a path to elimination.”
