Going through requests for new dot gov domain names is another one of those mundane bureaucratic processes that hardly any of us pay attention to, and of course it’s a process the Trump maladministration gummed up, and yet another Trump mess for President Biden’s presidency to clean up.
Pop quiz: what’s the URL of a page on which you can report fraud to the Federal Trade Commission? That would be ReportFraud.FTC.gov. That’s not the URL the FTC had hoped for, they wanted the still shorter ReportFraud.gov. I suppose it could be worse, it could be something like FTC.gov/something /other/report_fraud.jsp.
When classified documents salesman Donald Trump had the title of president, his maladministration rejected several requests to create new dot gov domain names, often without giving a reason, and generally slow-walking the process.
The requesting agencies were then forced to either create new subdomains (like the Report Fraud subdomain for FTC dot gov) or use significantly longer and less memorable URLs like state.gov/policy-issues/human-trafficking — the State Department wanted HumanTrafficking.gov.
We can only guess why those domain names were rejected. My guess is that it has something to do with Trump’s many frauds, and his involvement in human trafficking (look up Trump Model Management if you’re the slightest bit skeptical about that).
A quick little technical explanation is in order. Given an URL like http://www.example.com, the top level domain is “com,” the domain name is “example.com” and “www.example.com” might be implemented as a subdomain (we can get really in depth on this, but this should be sufficient for the topic at hand).
If you own example.com, you can create whatever subdomains you want (subject to certain technical limitations I won’t get into here). You could make mobile.example.com, ftp.example.com, mxyzptlk.example.com, etc.
But if you want examples.com, whatever the subdomain, you have to register it, unless it’s already registered to someone else (in which case you probably can’t have it). Anyone can get a dot com domain name, you just have to find an available domain name that you like and pay the price and applicable fees. The price can be as low as $10, or it can be much higher if it’s a desirable domain name.
Dot gov domain names are supposed to be only for U. S. government agencies (as opposed to privately owned businesses, universities, churches, etc.). If you’re the executive of an agency, you can authorize subdomains for your agency’s domain. But if you want a new domain name, it has to go through an approval process that might go all the way to the president.
David Levinthal for the Business Insider:
Donald Trump's White House blocked dozens of federal agencies from creating new government websites aimed at aiding homeless people, fighting human trafficking, and helping people vote, according to records obtained by Insider through a Freedom of Information Act request.
The requests for new websites came from agencies small and large at a time when Trump had grown openly hostile toward his own administration, often deriding the federal government's executive branch as an out-of-control "deep state" conspiring to undermine him.
The Department of Defense, Department of Labor, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Central Intelligence Agency, and Environmental Protection Agency are among the more than two-dozen agencies that Trump's Office of Management and Budget rebuffed.
The article is also available through MSN.
Levinthal looked at two time periods of roughly a year and a half, the first corresponding to the end of the Trump maladministration and the second to the beginning of President Biden’s presidency. Trump rejected more than 40% of requests, Biden rejected less than 5%.
According to the article,
Proposed websites that Trump's Office of Management and Budget rejected include HumanTrafficking.gov (Department of State); ReportFraud.gov (Federal Trade Commission); Telehealth.gov (Department of Health and Human Services), FindShelters.gov (Department of Housing and Urban Development), and FiscalData.gov (Department of the Treasury), according to federal records.
Not every one of the requests was a winner or a keeper. MisadventuresInMoneyManagement.gov, requested by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sure sounds like a turkey. And PeaceCorpsCN.gov turned out to not be necessary because it had been decided that the Peace Corps would be pulling out of China anyway.
Other rejections are much harder to explain if one assumes good faith from the Trump maladministration. Like, what was so bad about Biotechnology.gov requested by the Department of Agriculture? The rejection of ProsperAfrica.gov (later resubmitted and approved by the Biden administration) is quite puzzling if you ignore that Trump is a racist.
Treasury opted for a subdomain instead of their requested FiscalData.gov. That one is an interesting case, it apparently wasn’t meant for a public-facing website, but rather as a convenient way for Treasury employees to access an Amazon Web Services (AWS) resource. Maybe Barron Trump hasn’t passed any AWS certification exams and was utterly confused by the JSON response
{"Message":"User: anonymous is not authorized to perform: execute-api:Invoke on resource: arn:aws-us-gov:execute-api:us-gov-west-1:********4227:8lkmbc90m9/active/GET/404.html"}
AWS has this thing called GovCloud. I learned a little bit about it while studying for the Cloud Practitioner Foundational exam, then promptly forgot about it once I earned the certification. Just kidding.
The real explanation is almost certainly something nefarious, and relating to Donald Trump acting more like a gangster than a president or even an honest businessman. Back to Levinthal’s article:
And of the custom website domains Trump's Office of Management and Budget did OK, approval often took weeks or months instead of the days or hours typical for Biden's Office of Management and Budget.
One particularly testy delay came during the summer of 2020, when the Election Assistance Commission sought approval to create HelpAmericaVote.gov and use it to recruit and coordinate an army of new poll workers amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which by then had sidelined tens of thousands of older election volunteers unable or unwilling to staff in-person voting sites.
An unexpectedly long delay ensued. Finally, the Office of Management and Budget sunk the Election Assistance Commission's HelpAmericaVote.gov website, arguing in an email obtained by Insider that the election agency's request "did not justify the creation of a stand-alone site." The decision arrived as Trump's assertions that US elections were "rigged" and fraudulent had grown louder and evermore detached from reality.
Of course Trump wanted a rigged election, rigged in his favor, that is. Even he must have known that he was going to lose the popular vote again, and probably the Electoral College, too.
Then-Election Assistance Commission Executive Director Mona Harrington frantically appealed for reconsideration.
"This is really negatively impacting our progress at this point," she wrote Justin Grimes, then an official in the Office of Management and Budget's Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer. "Please advise, we desperately need the domain."
Several days later, the Office of Management and Budget reversed its decision, and HelpAmericaVote.gov would go live in mid-August 2020, just in time for National Poll Worker Recruitment Day on September 1. About 100,000 people visited the site that day, the Election Assistance Commission said.
In a statement to Insider at the time, Trump's Office of Management and Budget said it rejected the Election Assistance Commission's request for HelpAmericaVote.gov "because the information provided did not justify the creation of a stand-alone site based on existing requirements. OMB worked with EAC given the importance of the topic to improve the justification which led to approval."
Wait, what? Does that make any sense? So the OMB acknowledged that the topic of the HelpAmericaVote.gov website (which redirects to eac.gov/help-america-vote) was important. Isn’t “the importance of the topic” the whole justification for the domain name? Sounds to me like they didn’t want to admit the real reason for the initial rejection.
In any case, according to DotGov.gov, requests from federal agencies are supposed to be approved or denied within ten business days, twenty business days for state and local agencies.
I believe that it was the case during the Trump maladministration that decisions had to be made within twenty business days, and yet some requests took as long as four months for a decision, and for some requests there seems to be no record of the lag time from request to decision.
Trump's Office of Management and Budget did approve a few custom web domains quickly.
Among those granted the swiftest approval: TrumpLibrary.gov, TrumpWhiteHouse.gov, and FlyHealthy.gov.
The third of those is not active. The first two of these (which I won’t link) are active. The Trump Library website has this interesting answer in its FAQ:
The Donald J. Trump Presidential records are governed by the Presidential Records Act (PRA). ... Trump Presidential records will become subject to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests on January 20, 2026.
Former Vice President Mike Pence (R, 2017 — 2021) is also mentioned on that page, but no word on whether Trump wanted him killed on January 6, 2021.
Curiously, the General Services Administration on October 8, 2020, proposed creating BuildBackBetter.gov, which Trump's Office of Management and Budget approved the same day, according to federal records.
At that juncture, Biden has already made "build back better" a cornerstone plank of his 2020 presidential campaign platform. Trump's [mal]administration did not appear to use the BuildBackBetter.gov domain for any material purpose. But in mid-November 2020, then President-elect Biden began using it as part of his official presidential transition web presence, according to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
Was the motivation to deny then-President-elect Biden the use of that website or was it due to an awareness that Trump would not publicly accept the results of the election if he lost the Electoral College? I don’t know the answer to that question.
The closest Levinthal got to a reasonable explanation for the rejections came from Housing and Urban Development (HUD). “There has been a federal-wide ongoing effort to limit and reduce the number of federal public-facing websites. The effort was started to reduce cost and redundancy.”
Clearly the domain names cost something. But is the cost really more than what Trump price gouges the Secret Service at his chintzy properties? I almost forgot about that one with the whole Trump is a traitor who sells classified documents to the enemy thing...