OMB URL MIA WTH

That certainly could have been executed better.

I understand the rationale for the pause. In the past, there would be a great chest-puffing resolve to get to the bottom of wasteful spending, resulting in a blue-ribbon committee that took a year to put out a white paper, after which nothing changed. The pause approach says, “No more money until we decide whether you deserve it.” But perhaps instead of pausing everything and saying, “Here are the exceptions,” you say you’re pausing funding of 2,600 programs to see if they can justify their continued existence. Send out the Press Sec. to say, “Just like many American families take stock occasionally to see if they really need that streaming service or home food delivery, we’re looking hard at what we spend to ensure that the taxpayer’s money is spent the most effectively.”

I heard from some people caught up in the confusion, part of which was due to hair-on-fire coverage, and they were trying to get some guidance from the OMB website. Whereupon they hit a snag. To paraphrase Commodore Matt Decker, there was a website . . .

. . . but not anymore. Try it.

According to the Wayback Machine, omb.gov has, for a long time, redirected to the White House . . .

But it still had a page. If you use the search function on the White House page, it only calls up a recent memo unconnected to the zesty hullabaloo we saw on Tuesday.

The Administration has been cleaning out websites that reflect previous priorities with notable speed, and while they’re probably rebuilding it to their liking, it might be wiser to have a placeholder site instead of giving the impression that it no longer exists at all. The usual suspects will find the omissions dark and troubling, as with this piece from The Hill on website deletion:

“Under former President Biden’s term, the website highlighted the history behind the creation of the Constitution and why the country has the set of guiding rules.”

And that’s so! Absolutely true. But here’s the thing: It was in a whitehouse.gov subdirectory called /our-government, and the deletion appears to be the result of nuking the entire /our-government subdirectory. It was not put up during the Biden administration. The earliest captures from Wayback are from 2018, so it was the first Trump administration that put it up.

Thus a talking point is born, though. It will be an unshakable truth for many that the Trump administration took down the Constitution from the whitehouse.gov page. Never mind that it’s more an explainer on the subject than the actual document, which can be found at its usual site.

So I am not inclined to think this is an act of obfuscation - never ascribe to malice what can be etc. I’m just surprised that no news story seems to find it notable that the OMB site is gone. The NYT will link to the OMB memo but provides a .pdf without a link to the site from which it came. Because there isn’t any. Without a primary source, we have to rely on the NYT et al. to tell us what’s going on.

To the Times’ credit, it provides an exhaustive list of what’s up for review. It’s huge, and instructive. It’s good to give them a second look, maybe see if a few could be combined, maybe ask why COVID food assistance programs are still ongoing. But I think this could have been done better, with an OMB site that provided a clear, quick response to the whole situation. Instead, people get a picture of President Trump, and the impression given is "Nah, these are not the droids you're looking for."

I’m actually going to call the OMB on Wednesday and ask where their website is. I’ll let you know what I learn. And if you can find the OMB site, of course, post a link.