The USNWR rankings blow. They incentivize a lot of bad behavior. E.g. for law schools, they reward inefficiency (by counting expenditures per student positively towards the score.) Also, major aspects of the USNWR rankings is what academics think of each others' institutions, which is utterly irrelevant.
The US News rankings have a lot of factors which can easily be gamed and/or probably aren't relevant to ranking an institution based on quality. One that comes to mind is including the "Easiness" factor from RateMyProfessor as a positive metric (easier schools are ranked more highly).
On a more philosophical level, having a private 3rd party control the decisions of our college-bound youth could become problematic. How likely is it that the US News rankings may have some sort of bias, anything from an analyst's alma mater being ranked higher to quid pro quo bribery?
Hopefully, a public institution would be more robust in the face of these biases.
Whenever there are humans involved, there will be biases. Making it a government entity instead of a private entity doesn't change that. People are people.
There always seems to be a deep prevalence to think that the government is a purely objective, magic entity with no agenda or bias, rather than consisting of people, each with their own agenda and bias, like everyone else (and worse, consisting of parties that create strong group biases and agendas).
Even if you assumed the government perfectly represented the people, it would possess a very blatant agenda and bias, in the form of representing said people and what they vote in favor of.
I'd argue governments as political entities - keeping in mind what it takes to win in politics - are far more likely to hold extreme biases and agendas.
Any government system of reviewing universities will possess tremendous bias toward whatever people are in power that oversee such reviews. They will obviously rate universities that meet their favored criteria higher, matching up with their world-views about education / societal issues / etc.
