Under the stewardship of the Department of Education, recent acts of Congress confuse the methods of science with the process of science, possibly doing great harm to scholarship in education. An otherwise exemplary National Research Council report to help clarify the nature of educational science fails to emphasize the complexity of scientific work in education due to the power of contexts, the ubiquity of interactions, and the problem of decade by findings interactions. Discussion of these issues leads to the conclusion that educational science is unusually hard to do and that the government may not be serious about wanting evidence-based practices in education.