As Linda McMahon, Education Secretary, was busy breaking down her cabinet department, she promised to keep only the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also called the Nation’s Report Card. In early April, she declared at a meeting of ed tech companies and investors that the national exam was “something we absolutely need to keep,” because it’s a “way that we keep everybody honest” about the truth of how much students across the country actually know.
But, less than two weeks later, on Monday of this week, parts of NAEP came crashing down when the board overseeing the exam reluctantly voted to eliminate more than a dozen of the assessments that make up the Nation’s Report Card over the next seven years. The main reading and math tests, required by Congress, were saved. Yet, in an attempt to please Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) axed a 2029 administration of the Long-Term Trend NAEP, an exam that has tracked student achievement since the 1970s.
The board didn’t provide an official explanation for its moves. However, the vice chair, Martin West, a Harvard professor of education, said in an interview that the cuts were an effort to save the 2026 assessments. “A moment of reckoning came more quickly because of the pressures on the program to reduce expenses in real time,” he said. In other words, the board was effectively cutting off the patient’s appendages to try to save the brain and the heart. Despite the sacrifice, it’s still not clear that the gambit will work.
DOGE has been demanding 50 percent cuts to the $190 million a year testing program. Almost all the work is handled by outside contractors, such as Westat and ETS, and five-year contracts were awarded at the end of 2024. Instead of paying the vendors annually, DOGE has diced the payments into shorter increments, putting pressure on the contractors to accept sharp cuts, according to several former Education Department employees. At the moment, several of the contracts are scheduled to run out of money in May and June, and DOGE’s approval is needed to restart the flow of money. Indeed, DOGE allowed one NAEP contract to run out of funds entirely on March 31, forcing ETS employees to stop work on writing new questions for future exams.
