Narrative Control by Design: Why the First Victim of Ed Department Cuts Is the Truth

March 2025's education cuts aren't just about budgets—they're about erasing evidence. This is narrative control by design, a deliberate dismantling of oversight, data, and equity. We must witness. We must not be silent.

Introduction

March 2025 saw a quiet but devastating series of cuts from the U.S. Department of Education—quiet, not because they were insignificant, but because the implications have been drowned out by the language of bureaucracy and belt-tightening. On paper, it looks like the Department has merely restructured a few offices: oversight from the Office of Special Education Programs has been slashed, the Office of Educational Technology eliminated entirely, and sweeping layoffs at the National Center for Education Statistics have left the future of NAEP—the so-called Nation’s Report Card—in serious doubt. Each of these could be read as separate moves, symptoms of budgetary constraints or shifting priorities. But taken together, they reveal a much darker pattern: these cuts are not isolated events, nor are they neutral. They represent a deliberate dismantling of the systems that allow the public to understand harm—particularly the harm experienced by disabled students, students of colour, and those living in poverty. The thread that ties these actions together is narrative control. By cutting the mechanisms that track inequity, surface noncompliance, and document long-term trends, those in power ensure that suffering becomes anecdotal, invisible, and ultimately deniable. This isn’t incidental fallout. It’s strategy.

Pretending to Care: A Past Already in Decay

For years—decades even—the Democratic Party positioned itself as the defender of public education, wrapping itself in the language of equity and opportunity while securing the backing of major education unions like the NEA and AFT. Candidates regularly ran on promises to “invest in our children” and “support our teachers.” Familiar refrains like “Every child deserves a world-class education” echoed from campaign stages and press releases. Representative Bobby Scott once declared, “Education is a civil right,” whilst Senator Patty Murray insisted, “Our nation’s future depends on whether we give every child a fair shot.” Both have long been hailed as stalwart allies of the public education system and were consistent recipients of endorsements from education unions. In 2020, Senator Elizabeth Warren proclaimed, “Our public schools are the bedrock of our democracy.” And in 2022, Senator Bernie Sanders called education “a human right, not a privilege.”

And yet, for all these lofty words, what was actually enshrined in law during the years of Democratic supermajorities? What structural safeguards were passed to protect IDEA, to strengthen Title I funding, to ensure that data collection around equity couldn’t be wiped out with the stroke of a pen? The answer, painfully, is very little. The architecture of public education was left exposed—by design or by neglect—to be dismantled when the winds changed. And now that the axe is falling, those same champions of education have gone oddly quiet.

As the U.S. Department of Education slashes oversight, dismantles data infrastructure, and shutters the very offices meant to ensure compliance and accountability, there’s no righteous fury in the halls of Congress. No emergency legislation. No urgent press conference to defend the rights of disabled students or the integrity of public education. The crisis is here, but the defenders are not. The slogans have faded, the endorsements secured, the election cycles passed. The pretense is over. No one is even pretending to care anymore.

Disabling Accountability: The Case of OSEP Oversight

One of the most chilling elements of the March 2025 cuts is what’s happening to the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP). A recent Disability Scoop article lays out the situation plainly: the Department of Education is drastically reducing the number of staff responsible for monitoring state compliance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). The article quotes disability advocates sounding the alarm about families being left with “little to no recourse” when schools fail to provide legally mandated services. But what the piece doesn’t explicitly say—though it’s there between the lines—is that these cuts don’t just reduce enforcement capacity; they dismantle the very infrastructure that allows us to see systemic noncompliance in the first place.

Monitoring isn’t just about intervening when something goes wrong. It’s about creating a public record, a paper trail, a body of evidence that can be used to demand change. When OSEP staff are eliminated, the monitoring reports that highlight inequities in service delivery don’t get written. Data on how states are implementing IDEA requirements—already difficult to access and interpret—simply stops being gathered. When no one is watching, violations don’t show up in spreadsheets or federal dashboards. They just disappear.

And with them, so does accountability. The families who already fight uphill battles for services now face an even steeper climb, made worse by the loss of the federal backstop that once—at least in theory—had their backs. Without enforcement and without data, there is no way to demonstrate patterns of denial or systemic neglect. Each complaint becomes an isolated incident, easily dismissed. This is not just a dereliction of duty; it’s a form of structural silencing. By defunding oversight and starving the public of information, the system ensures that noncompliance becomes invisible. And in the logic of bureaucracy, what cannot be seen does not exist. Silence becomes compliance.

The Silence of the Scores: Hollowing Out NCES and NAEP

The layoffs at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the gutting of the NAEP—America’s so-called “Nation’s Report Card”—may look like technocratic adjustments to the untrained eye, but they strike at the heart of how we understand equity in education. As K12 Dive reports, these cuts have left NAEP operations “barebones,” with agency staff warning, “We won’t have capacity to do deep dives.” On the surface, this might sound like little more than a delay in reports or a few less charts. But in reality, it means the country is losing one of the last remaining tools for tracking long-term academic outcomes across race, disability status, language background, income, and geography.

NAEP data has been used for decades to measure the scope of educational inequality—however imperfectly—and to hold systems accountable for persistent achievement gaps. Without this data, equity gaps don’t disappear, but they do become easier to ignore. The public will no longer see the national picture of who is being served and who is being left behind. And that’s the point. When we stop collecting disaggregated data, disparities can no longer be tracked. When we no longer track them, we no longer feel the pressure to explain them—or fix them.

This isn’t just a budget cut. It’s a form of strategic erasure. By hollowing out NCES and NAEP, the federal government is effectively blinding itself—and the public—to the impact of its own policies. It becomes impossible to identify trends over time, to see how one administration’s decisions compound across years and cohorts. The cuts don’t solve the problem of inequality; they merely strip away the evidence. It's the statistical equivalent of shuttering the fire alarm while the building burns, and insisting the absence of a siren means everything is fine.

Unplugging the Future: The Elimination of the Office of Ed Tech

When I visited the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology website just a few weeks ago, I was met with something chilling in its simplicity: a placeholder page. The entire site—once filled with frameworks, resources, and policy guidance around digital equity, AI, and tech integration—had been scrubbed clean. No archive, no sunset message, just silence. It was as though the office had never existed. And perhaps that’s the intention.

Education Week reported on the sudden elimination of the Office of Ed Tech, noting the loss of capacity to coordinate national efforts around digital learning. But the article, like much of the mainstream coverage, doesn’t go far enough. It makes no mention of what this means for data, surveillance, or the frameworks we need to talk meaningfully about equity in a rapidly digitising world. Yet this erasure is deeply consequential. The Office of Ed Tech wasn’t just about recommending devices or internet access—it was one of the few federal entities willing to name and explore the digital divide, and to question how emerging technologies might replicate or deepen inequity in schools.

By axing this office, the Department is doing more than “streamlining.” It’s preemptively silencing the future. The conversation about who has access to digital tools, how AI is being used in education, and which students are being left out or over-surveilled—those conversations are now institutionally homeless. Without a central body to research, convene, and publish on these issues, there is no coordinated way to track what’s happening. There is no shared language or metric. This isn’t merely a cut to a department; it’s a calculated step to ensure that the next generation of inequality goes undocumented and unchallenged.

When we erase the office that might have raised concerns about algorithmic bias, data privacy, or unequal access to learning tech, we don’t eliminate those problems—we simply guarantee that they unfold unchecked. And once again, that’s the point. What we don’t measure, we can’t contest. The placeholder page isn’t just an administrative gap—it’s a digital tombstone for what was once a commitment, however modest, to understanding the shape of injustice before it fully takes form.

Neoliberal Shock Therapy and the Removal of Witnesses

What I see unfolding now—through these cuts, through the erasure of oversight, the silencing of data, and the dismantling of what little infrastructure was left—is a pattern my autistic, gestalt-processing brain cannot unsee. The fragments arrive from different places: headlines, PDFs, disappearing websites, phrases tucked quietly into policy briefs. But together they form a shape I recognise, because history has already taught it to me. This is Shock Doctrine. Classic neoliberal crisis exploitation, just as Naomi Klein warned us. But this time, it isn’t being exported. This time, it’s happening here.

The United States has long inflicted this kind of economic and infrastructural violence on others—on Latin America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and anywhere else deemed ripe for restructuring in the name of “stability” and “growth.” But then, it was done to others. This time, it’s being done to us. And the methods are the same: wait for a crisis, or manufacture one, then dismantle public institutions whilst the population is too disoriented, too exhausted, or too propagandised to resist. Destroy the protections. Defund the oversight. But most importantly—erase the documentation. Ensure there are no witnesses. Ensure there’s no proof.

The data that once allowed us to track harm—disaggregated scores, compliance reports, broadband access statistics, AI implementation reviews—is being starved out of existence. This is not about spinning the story. This is about ensuring there is no story to spin. If we can’t measure harm, we can’t prove it exists. And if we can’t prove it exists, then no one is held to account.

But here’s the truth that keeps me up at night: there is no International Criminal Court coming to intervene. There is no benevolent outside power preparing to sanction this state for its treatment of disabled children, poor children, trans children. We are reaping at home what this country has sown abroad for longer than I’ve been alive. The government has turned inward, and it has turned on its people. And for those of us caught at the intersection—disabled, queer, poor, racialised—there is nowhere to turn. We’re here. And the system is making sure no one sees us fall.

The Class Divide: Why They Don’t Care

None of this touches the ruling class. Their children don’t go to public schools. They don’t rely on IDEA protections or Title I funding. Their futures aren’t mapped by NAEP scores, nor are their learning conditions shaped by whether or not the Office of Ed Tech exists. They live in a different world entirely—one buffered by private consultants, elite prep schools, trust funds, and social capital. When public systems falter, they barely notice. They’ve never needed data to protect their children. They have lawyers, networks, options. The rest of us have paperwork and hope.

And so, whilst those in power gut the structures meant to safeguard equity and uphold rights, they do so without consequence to their own lives. Their schools are untouched. Their children are never at risk of being underserved or uncounted. But mine are. And so are yours.

I work with students who are already at the margins of a system barely willing to acknowledge their presence. These cuts don’t create new inequalities—they entrench existing ones. They remove even the possibility of public recognition. My students need the data. They need the compliance mechanisms. They need the oversight, the documentation, the watchful eyes that make abuse just a little harder to get away with. Because without those things, the system reverts to what it was always built to be—a tool for sorting, not serving.

And when I speak up, when I push back, I do so not because I believe the system will save them, but because I know that without these imperfect structures, the most vulnerable among us will simply be left to disappear. These cuts make it easier for those in power to look away. But for those of us who live and work in the places they never see, looking away is not an option.

Final thoughts …

This is a silent war on public knowledge. A slow, deliberate stripping away of the mechanisms that allow us to see, to name, to fight back. The March 2025 education cuts are not merely bureaucratic adjustments or unfortunate side effects of political gridlock—they are acts of narrative erasure. They are setting the stage for something far more devastating.

As Naomi Klein wrote in The Shock Doctrine, the first phase is always confusion—an overwhelming firehose of news, announcements, closures, and jargon, designed to disorient and exhaust. That’s what we’re living through now. But this chaos isn’t the end goal—it’s the prelude. Once the dust settles, and once no one is left watching, that’s when the looting begins. The real restructuring. The handover of what remains of the public trust to private interests, piece by piece. We’ve seen this play out in countries subjected to economic warfare from the outside—places that lost decades of progress, whose public sectors were dismantled under the guise of “reform,” leaving the people to pick through the rubble. Most have never recovered.

Now, that model is being turned inward. This time, it’s not Baghdad or Buenos Aires. It’s Baltimore. It’s Bakersfield. And there’s no cavalry coming.

We must refuse to let this story be erased. Refuse the false comfort of thinking these are just budget fights or bureaucratic reshuffles. We must be loud, persistent, and unrelenting. We must write, record, archive, and witness—because what they are counting on is that we won’t notice until it’s too late.

If no one is watching, they can pretend nothing is happening.
Our job now is to be the witness and the voice.