After the Cuts: What’s Going on with National Education Statistics and the ERIC Database?
Alison Lehner-Quam
In winter and spring 2025, due to the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and presidential executive orders, the Department of Education experienced dramatic cuts (Reid & Sayag, 2025). The Department of Education is home to two valuable resources that CUNY librarians, faculty, and students frequently use for research: The Education Resources Information Center database (ERIC https://eric.ed.gov/) and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES https://nces.ed.gov/).
Members of CUNY’s Education Librarians Affinity Group: Eric Silberberg (Queens), Aliqae Geraci (Graduate Center), Gina Levitan (Hunter), Stephanie Margolin (Hunter), and Alison Lehner-Quam (Lehman) have been tracking cuts related to these education resources. Threats of cuts, communication about cuts, and actual cuts have created a tentative and insecure education research landscape.
On September 25th, Affinity Group members presented a webinar sharing their latest insights into the status of ERIC and NCES. The information in this article is drawn from Silberberg, Geraci, Levitan, Margolin, and Lehner-Quam’s research, which is available in this PowerPoint: https://tinyurl.com/afterthecuts. The webinar included an overview of Government Role in Education Research, the Status of ERIC, and Status of NCES.
The Department of Education (later titled Office of Education, among other titles and reporting structures over its long history) was first established in 1867 to collect information and statistics about United States schools. A few years earlier, the Morrill Act of 1862 established land-grant colleges.
The relationship between national education legislation and assessments continued, leading to creation of Institute for Education Studies (IES) in 2002, after No Child Left Behind legislation (Provasnik et al., 2024). National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), part of Institute for Education Studies (IES), has produced numerous annual publications and education assessments, including: National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which was an Elementary and Secondary Education Act requirement; Digest of Education Statistics; and Condition of Education.
ERIC’s history is not as long as the history of the U.S. government’s collection of education data. ERIC began after a feasibility study in 1959, and opened in 1964. Documents, such as research reports on education topics, were initially distributed via mail and then microfiche, but as information dissemination technology developed, CD-ROM and then online databases provided access to indexed reports, scholarly journal articles (indexed beginning in 1969), and books (indexed beginning in 1993).
Resource indexing was initially done by indexers at subject specialist clearinghouses throughout the country, but eventually work was centralized after 2002 when ERIC joined Institute of Education Sciences (U.S. Department of Education, 2024). Publications included Research in Education (later known as Resources in Education) and Thesaurus of ERIC Descriptors. The ERIC database is freely available on the web, and also part of subscription packages through the EBSCO vendor (https://libguides.lehman.edu/az/eric-ebsco ) at Lehman.
So, what are we losing from ERIC? In April 2025, The Hechinger Report indicated that ERIC’s $5.5M budget had been reduced by 50 percent and that management of the ERIC library was to be conducted by AEM Corporation (Barshay, 2025). Impact of this budget reduction is beginning to be felt: in June 2025, the actual number of journals in ERIC decreased from 1279 to 1218.
And what are we losing from NCES? Commissioner of NCES was placed on administrative leave, and most of NCES staff were let go, with research contracts being canceled. With minimal staff, NAEP report was delayed for 2025 and Condition of Education missed their June 1st deadline. Brown Center on Education Policy reported on delay of data, noting that in June 2024, there were 270 tables of education statistics available in Digest of Education Statistics, compared to only 27 in June 2025 (Baker, 2025).
Webinar attendees left the session with practical strategies and resources to help sustain their education research in these uncertain times. Advice included backing up government data sets and information. Consider using ERICA, a rescue catalog (https://erica.datarescueproject.org/) to see open access publications from ERIC, and use the Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org/collection-search/files.eric.ed.gov/) to access previous versions of government websites, including ERIC. Links to the webinar slides and to a Research Guide page with links to alternative sites were distributed.
At the end of the presentation section of the webinar, questions about government education resources were plentiful, including one about quality of ERIC indexing in the future. This situation is ongoing, and CUNY Education Librarians Affinity Group members vowed to monitor availability and access to ERIC and NCES resources.
Baker, D. J. (2025, June 25). The US Department of Education is far behind in producing key statistics. Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-u-s-department-of-education-is-far-behind-on-producing-key-statistics/#:~:text=School%20of%20Public%20Policy%20and,REUTERS/Kent%20Nishimura
Barshay, J. (2025, April 28). Education Department restarts online library ERIC. The Hechinger Report, https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-restart-eric-ed-library/
Provasnik, S., Barnett, M., Snyder, T., Zhang, A., and Cui, J. (2024). A retrospective look at U.S. education statistics (NCES 2022-080. U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/annualreports/topical-studies/retrospective/#/elem-sec-ed/num-of-elem-sec-schools/
Reid, A., & Sayag, E. K. (2025, March 21). What to know about Trump’s order to close the Education Department. National Conference of State Legislatures. https://www.ncsl.org/state-legislatures-news/details/what-to-know-about-trumps-order-to-close-the-education-department
US Department of Education. (2024). ERIC through the decades. US Department of Education. https://eric.ed.gov/pdf/ERIC_Through_the_Decades.pdf