The House Committee on Ethics, a bipartisan panel tasked with ensuring lawmakers and their staffers adhere to the chamber’s rules, quietly updated its website in December to block search engines from indexing its pages, making it hard for the public to find them.
The update came as the committee was coming under pressure over the results of its investigation ... [+]
Sometime between Dec. 18 and 19, the House Ethics Committee added a line of code to its website, according to archived versions of the site on archive.org and the site’s publicly available source code, which instructs search engines like Google to not include the page in their search results or follow any links on the page.
As a result, the committee’s homepage no longer appeared in Google search results for “House ethics committee” (without quotes).
The update came as the committee was coming under pressure over whether or not to publish the results of its investigation into sexual misconduct allegations facing then-attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz.
The website remained publicly accessible by entering its address, ethics.house.gov, into a browser or by following links from other websites.
On Tuesday, after Forbes’ inquiry, the committee revised its website, allowing search engines to index it again.
Ethics Committee Chief of Staff Tom Rust declined to comment to Forbes, as did a spokesperson for the Office of the Chief Administrative Officer, which provides technical support to the chamber. Representatives of the Committee on House Administration, which oversees the chamber’s operations, did not immediately respond to a request for comments.
The committee’s move to limit access to its website came just two weeks before it announced it was dropping its investigations into four lawmakers accused of using campaign funds for personal expenses. At that time, the panel also narrowed how it defined personal use–limiting violations to disbursements that explicitly break federal law, according to Daniel Schuman, the executive director of the American Governance Institute, a non-profit focused on strengthening government institutions. Additionally, the committee raised the burden of proof for misuse of campaign funds, stating it would only take action if there was evidence of intent.
It’s unclear why the code was added to the ethics committee’s website, who authorized the change or whether other government agencies have implemented similar search engine restrictions.
The House Committee on Ethics is still investigating at least six lawmakers from cases opened in a previous Congress. Those under scrutiny include Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, D-Fla., Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, D-NY, and Andy Ogles, R-Tenn.