Millions of people have signed petitions hosted on the White House website since President Trump took office, but not one has received a promised response as the service’s future remains uncertain.
By all appearances, the “We the People” petition platform — a reliable springboard onto daytime TV during the Obama administration — is a low priority and awaiting an inevitable death after nine months of dormancy.
Launched under former President Barack Obama, the service promises an answer to petitions that gather 100,000 signatures, but White House staff have discussed shutting it down under Trump.
The topic was raised during a meeting in May, and by June 1, then-White House communications director Mike Dubke said in an email: “Believe it or not, we are close to making an announcement.”
Dubke said cost was a consideration after that justification was given in April for ending voluntary disclosure of partial visitor logs, an Obama-era policy the White House also said gave a deceptive facade of transparency.
Among White House staff, consensus formed over the summer about what to do about the petition site, according to one official involved in the discussions.
But before anyone could “pull the trigger,” the official said, there was a significant staff shakeup in late July and early August, with new employees — including a new communications director and press secretary — creating a need for additional consultation.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders did not respond to an email inquiring about the current status of discussions.
Under Obama, critics called the service a propaganda tool used to bolster policy pushes or win laughs, with talk of building a Death Star, while ignoring inconvenient causes, such as waiting 25 months to turn down a pardon request from supporters of Edward Snowden.
But defenders see the site as a worthwhile step forward for citizen engagement.
Nate Lubin, director of the White House Office of Digital Strategy from 2013 to 2015, said he believes the Trump administration should keep the site, though he’s not optimistic they will.
“The point of the site was to give the American people a voice with a direct line to the White House and to encourage transparency,” he said. “The Trump administration doesn’t seem to value those motivations.”
Lubin said expenses would not be significant.
“To just maintain the status quo site would be quite cheap,” he said.
“We had a few staff members who rotated through maintenance in addition to other duties,” Lubin said. “Nobody’s sole job on staff was to do that. In terms of hard costs, tech maintenance alone — without improvements — would be cheap, and could be budgeted from resources already deployed to WhiteHouse.gov more broadly.”
During Trump’s first months in office, there was a clear anti-administration bent to petitions. The top-ranked petition currently awaiting a response is a 1.1 million-person demand to see Trump’s tax returns. A petition with nearly 140,000 signatures tells him to resign.
But as the year progressed, Trump supporters, who have a powerful online presence, fired back. The second-most-popular petition awaiting a response — with about 360,000 signatures — is a demand that the U.S. government recognize the Antifa movement as a terrorist group. More than 150,000 people asked that liberal donor George Soros have his assets seized.
The author of the anti-Antifa petition, an online persona called Microchip, said they made the petition in August to distract from the fallout from Trump’s remarks blaming “both sides” for violence between white supremacists and anti-racism activists in Charlottesville, Va.
“It was to bring our broken right side together … and prop up antifa as a punching bag,” Microchip told Politico. “So the narrative changed from ‘I hate myself because we have neo-Nazis on our side’ to ‘I really hate antifa, let’s get along and tackle the terrorists.'”
Although petitions offer the Trump team an opportunity to reframe public discourse, there’s no indication the site will be revived.
“In light of their ongoing palace intrigue and staff turmoil, I would be surprised if the White House invested resources and capacity to make this the responsive platform it was originally intended to be,” said David Karpf, a George Washington University professor of media and public affairs.
“The troll’s anti-Antifa petition is a nice example of what we are likely to see on ‘We The People’ for the foreseeable future,” he added. “If the government isn’t going to fulfill its promise to respond to popular petitions, then petitions on this website are really only useful as brief media stunts.”
