Though it was widely tweeted that President Trump was signing a blank sheet of paper a tweet last week, causing speculation that the whole photo was staged — it wasn’t. The paper may have been blank, but Trump did sign 49 bills into law on December 21.

Unfortunately fact-checkers jumped the gun. Business Insider reported:

[T]he number of bills on the desk didn’t match the number of laws passed by the president that day which, according to govtrack.us, was two. No more bills have been signed since December 21, the date of the tweet.

While our site and the government site Congress.gov did both show only two bills signed into law that day, and the next, and even five days later, the information was out of date. Today the data on the 49 bills, including the criminal justice reform bill, finally became available.

This isn’t entirely exceptional. Legislative status isn’t usually up to date until the day after events occur — that’s because legislative clerks in Congress have to type up everything that happened each day and check it twice (sorry, a bad Christmas joke, but it’s also basically true). When legislation is signed, the White House has to send a formal message back to Congress, which adds more time for the data to be entered. Usually this all happens within a few days. Maybe the government shutdown and Christmas were responsible for the extra delay — we don’t know. The Office of the Federal Register, which assigns a number to each newly enacted law, still hasn’t announced the new laws.

Here’s the list of the 49 bills, and all enacted legislation so far in the 115th Congress, on GovTrack:

The corresponding page on Congress.gov is here.

While it’s normal for official legislative status to be delayed, it’s also an unacceptable lack of transparency. So long as a core tenet of our government is that everyone can know what the law is, a six-day blackout on what is and isn’t the law should not happen again. The President and Congress should make it a priority to let the American public know when a law is enacted.

Apologies to Business Insider for the confusion nevertheless.

This post was written by GovTrack founder Joshua Tauberer.