Why ProPublica Had to Build the Ethics Database the Government Should Have Built
What a sweeping new trove of Trump appointee disclosures reveals about the weakness of America’s ethics guardrails
On March 9, 2026, ProPublica published something that, on its face, should not have felt remarkable: a searchable database of financial disclosure records for more than 1,500 Trump administration appointees. The records themselves were not secret. They were, in the formal sense, public. Yet once they were gathered, standardized, and made searchable in o…
