Evidence is mounting that federal employees and their agents may have directed or even pressured states to choose specific assessments, consultants, and the criteria for evaluating core reading programs as conditions for getting funding under the Reading First initiative, possibly in violation of federal law. "Education Week" found such a pattern of behavior in an examination of thousands of pages of correspondence and official documentation obtained through open-records requests, as well as interviews with education officials across the country. This article presents complaints that federal representatives have overstepped their authority. It also discusses the complaint by Kentucky officials to the U.S. Department of Education, as well as the directive from the Education Department to use Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, or DIBELS, in Illinois.