The White House has shut down its public petition website but don’t worry, it’s just a temporary measure. It has confirmed that an updated version of the petition website will go live in the near future. The site was taken offline late last night after 11 months of silence on it. The White House has promised to respond to public concerns raised through petitions in 2018.
The AP reports that the administration said that the platform was extensively used by its critics and less frequently by its allies. The White House plans to launch a new petition site in January.
A White House official told the scribe that all existing petitions and responses will be restored in January 2018. Petitions that reach the required 100,000 signatures will also start receiving responses then.
The official has also said that the new petition site is going to save taxpayers $1.3 million annually without really going into the details of actually how it’s going to do that.
The administration hasn’t responded to any of the 17 petitions that reached the required number of signatures since President Trump came into office on January 20th, 2017.
Some of the petitions call on the president to release his tax returns and to place his assets in a blind trust. Others call on the president to either preserve or stop funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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