The Bush administration has sought to help out workers and businesses in these trying times by launching a new Web site with a number of resources. But www.EconomicRecovery.gov has shortcomings. And they call into question yet again the administration’s decision last year to shut down the public job board America’s Job Bank.

The new site offers assistance on topics including unemployment insurance, local job openings and retirement security information.

“We want to make information easily accessible and quickly available to American workers affected by the economic downturn,” Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao said in a statement.

Kudos to Chao and other officials for trying to create a helping hub for workers, who confront decimated 401(k) retirement accounts, ever-clearer signs of a recession and an unemployment rate that climbed 1.4 percentage points from September 2007 to September 2008, to 6.1 percent.

But key information is not necessarily “easily accessible” or “quickly available” on the new site. Finding local jobs, for example, can be byzantine and slow. Trying to look up accounting jobs in the New Jersey area, for example, can take you seven clicks or more. And two clicks in, you see a list of resources for New Jersey that doesn’t even directly mention job listings: You have to guess that either the “New Jersey State Gateway” or “New Jersey Department of Labor” sites will get you to the jobs.

And what if you’re willing to relocate across the country to find a job? You can eventually get to private-sector national job banks like JOBcentral, National Labor Exchange or Monster.com from the EconomicRecovery.gov site. But it’s not immediately clear how. And if you click on “One-Stop Career Center,” it still takes four more clicks to get to JOBcentral.

It all would be much simpler if America’s Job Bank were still around. Dating to 1995, the site was one of first job boards on the Internet and remained one of the biggest, with about 2.2 million jobs, when it was closed in mid-2007. It was national in scale, allowing people to find jobs locally and across the country.

Chao’s department said America’s Job Bank had outdated technology and duplicated what was already available in the private sector. But businesses and state officials appreciated the site, which offered free job listings to employers. It contained many postings for lower-skilled jobs. And other evidence, including internal Labor Department research, argued for its preservation.

At a time when thousands of U.S. workers are losing jobs and many more face that possibility, the absence of America’s Job Bank is all the more confounding. If it were around today, would it be helping Americans better respond to the economic challenges at hand? Quite possibly.

It seems a pro-privatization ideology may have helped kill America’s Job Bank. Ironically, the Bush administration recently did a philosophical about-face on free markets, bailing out huge firms in response to the financial industry meltdown.

That change of heart was too late for America’s Job Bank, leaving the country to wonder once again if it was shortchanged.