Amid rumors that the White House is planning to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, petitions have been launched to preserve the agencies, which are the biggest sources of government funding for art and academic research.
But people in the arts world allege that something funky is going on with the petitions, which live on whitehouse.gov, and they’re suggesting that White House may be monkeying around with the site to artificially depress support for the petitions. They point to fairly high levels of sharing of the petitions on social media, but a relatively static number of signatures.
The petitions to save the NEA and NEH were started on January 21 on the government’s We the People petition platform with a goal of getting 100,000 signatures—the amount needed to get an official response from the White House. On January 27, one of the petitions showed a mere 96 signatures and another 983. Meanwhile, hundreds of people on social media suggested that they had signed but that their signatures were not reflected in the counts stated on the site.
One tweeter claimed a “petition was near 100k yesterday, now it’s reset & not counting votes. WHY?” while another said “when I signed the NEA/NEH petition 2 days ago it had tens of thousands of signatures. Now, only 44…”
A petition on charge.org to save the two agencies has already generated more than 21,000 signatures.
The Independent first reported the allegations that something was amiss with the petitions on whitehouse.gov. “Some might chalk this up to a technical glitch. Others might label it ‘alternative counting,’” Michael Anthony writes in Artfcity magazine.
“As a test, we signed both currently active petitions (on whitehouse.gov), verified our email address, and received confirmation that our signatures had been counted, but the number did not increase on either one,” Jillian Steinhauer wrote in Hyperallergic magazine.
But BuzzFeed quoted the Trump Administration as saying that while there does appear to be a problem, it’s likely technical and not political. “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,” a White House spokesman said.
BuzzFeed suggests that broken URLs may partly explain why the signature counts aren’t rising more significantly. It also points out that other petitions on We the People that aren’t sympathetic to the Trump Administration seem to wracking up plenty of signatures, which would also suggest against some plot by the new government.
Trump has been critical of federal arts funding on several occasions. A report by the Hill claims that there is already a budget proposal put forward that includes killing the NEA.