In reality, these US News rankings are nonsense and largely meaningless. They're formulaic and reliant upon the schools actually participating in the information gathering that the magazine does. Some schools in the past notoriously didn't participate and were lower in the rankings than they would be otherwise. The problem is, so many parents use this as the gospel of what a "good school" is that they've become too popular to not play along with their game.
Well, if only Carnegie would release their info publicly, then maybe parents would have a better idea. I suspect though that Carnegie needs the money (because it spends a ton bringing experts in to evaluate departments with a fine toothed comb over several days and even weeks) and because parents wouldn't really know what they were looking at. Carnegie would also lose customers if it ever decided to actually rank departments.
Having seen the Carnegie reports, they are very detailed and telling. You can see exactly how your department ranks in any metric, how your college (i.e. college inside a university) ranks, and that gives you an overall idea.
If you put the Carnegie stuff next to USNews, there is just a world of difference. The Carneige stuff look much more like the AAU, which isn't good or bad for UConn since UConn would still be around 60 in those numbers, but a lot of schools in the USNWP list would drop off.