When the Obama administration set up the White House petitions page We The People in 2011, it came with a promise to respond to all petitions that had met the 100,000 signatures in 30 days threshold—there were very serious petitions and not so serious petitions. All in all, the White House under President Obama responded to about 321 petitions. Since President Donald Trump has taken office, there are a slew of petitions up on the site, none of them asking for the government to create a Death Star infrastructure stimulus package. Here are the top petitions on the Trump administration’s petition page.
Number 1, with 569,013 signatures
Immediately release Donald Trump's full tax returns, with all information needed to verify emoluments clause compliance.
Created by A.D. on January 20, 2017
Number 2, with 182,461 signatures
Divest or put in a blind trust all of the President's business and financial assets.
Created by H.B. on January 20, 2017
Number 3, with 176,277 signatures
Preserve the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities
Created by S.C. on January 21, 2017
Those are actually very big numbers in short spans of time for the petition site. But as Buzzfeed pointed out a few days ago, it looks like the site might have stopped tallying petition numbers.
Right now, though, We The People seems to be barely registering some signatures. A petition titled “Preserve the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities” only had 96 signatures at press time, despite accruing hundreds of shares on Twitter alone. (The president is expected to cut funding for the NEA and NEH dramatically.) Another petition for a similar cause has showed a relatively static number of signatures, despite a continuing high volume of social shares. It is possible that the similarity of these petitions is spreading signatures thinly between them, though another petition about something entirely different shared widely on Twitter also has only one signature.
Trump’s administration seemed to acknowledge that something was wrong with the website, but denied it had intentionally stalled the platform. A spokesperson for the White House told BuzzFeed News, “It’s a question of high volume at the end of the day, but the signatures are being captured. Because of high volume they’re having to change how they’re being captured.” The spokesperson did not elaborate on what that change would entail.
There’s one thing that’s “bigly” and “yuuuge” in the Trump administration—anger and dissent!