More than three years in, combined website emerges

During the 2008 presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama promised to "create a centralized Internet database of lobbying reports, ethics records and campaign finance filings in a searchable, sortable and downloadable format."

On March 8, 2012, the White House unveiled ethics.gov, a website that combines one-stop-shopping for information on White House visitor records, Office of Government Ethics travel reports, Lobbying Disclosure Act data, Department of Justice Foreign Agents Registration Act data, Federal Election Commission individual contribution reports, FEC candidate reports and FEC committee reports.

In a blog post, John Wonderlich of the Sunlight Foundation, a pro-transparency group, wrote that the new site "allows for keyword searches, displaying relevant results from a variety of different sources, and also allowing bulk downloads of the related data."

Wonderlich wrote that the site is "unlikely" to become "the main destination for investigative journalists or ethics officials." But he added that this was "a tricky promise to fulfill, which is probably part of the reason it's taken almost four years to implement. It's tricky because presidents haven't played this role before -- of trying to bring together various sources of ethics data into a single search, to empower public oversight. That's the reason that we're excited about Ethics.gov -- the president is acknowledging the role of public oversight and asserting that the president has a responsibility to create meaningful online disclosure of ethics and influence information."

Wonderlich offered special praise for the travel reports, which "weren't easy to get before," and the ability to search for a name and see that person"s White House visits alongside campaign contributions. "That's a pretty exciting view," he wrote.

We asked both Wonderlich and Meredith McGehee, policy director at the Campaign Legal Center, whether they thought this qualified as a Promise Kept. Both said they felt it did.

We rate this a Promise Kept.