The Education Department continued announcing selected civil-rights investigations. It stopped maintaining the public list that would let people see the selection.

ProPublica reports today that the Office for Civil Rights abandoned that list when Trump returned to office. The newsroom sued for internal records, obtained case data and has now published a searchable database. The search box needed a lawsuit.

Individual cases had not all become invisible: department press releases, school acknowledgments and reporting from internal data still disclosed some. What disappeared was the routinely available overview. The government could tell you which investigation it wished to announce without giving you the list against which to read the announcement.

The department says it inherited 19,000 unresolved cases and is restoring the office’s role in enforcing discrimination law for all students.

An agency defending its work can now direct the public to a useful searchable record of that work. It will have to send them to the newsroom that sued it.

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