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White House Disclosure Page Returns After Someone Asks Where It Went
· New York time
A White House page listing dozens of financial disclosure forms went offline without explanation and returned after CBS News asked about its removal. The page provides access to public disclosures, making its disappearance significant for anyone trying to examine the financial interests officials are required to report. Its return restored that route to the forms, but the disappearance itself was not explained in the reporting. Public disclosure depends on more than a rule requiring documents to exist. People must also be able to find and examine the records, especially when a government website serves as the obvious place to look. A missing page can therefore turn a routine search into a question for the office responsible for making the material available. Here, the sequence was straightforward: the page went offline, CBS News made an inquiry, and the page returned. That timing makes a neat little story about transparency, though it does not establish why the page disappeared or why it was restored. The official promise of public access sounds grander than the practical task of keeping a link working. Yet the link is where the promise meets the person trying to use it. For a brief period, the disclosure page offered an unintended lesson in accessibility: the quickest way to find it was apparently to ask where it had gone.
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