White House Launches Modernized Public Input Portal, Requires Citizens to First Fax a Form Confirming They Know What a Fax Is

By Barnaby Quince | The Proceedings Today

The White House Office of Public Engagement announced Monday the long-awaited rollout of its Modernized Citizen Input and Response Environment — or MCIRE, pronounced, according to the official press release, however you'd like — describing the new portal as "a historic leap forward in participatory democracy" and "fully operational pending resolution of seventeen known issues."

The system, three years in development at a cost the administration declined to specify beyond "within the range of numbers," allows any American citizen to formally submit feedback on federal policy, provided they first complete an accessibility survey, verify their identity through a legacy authentication system that accepts only fax transmissions, and attend a mandatory 90-minute orientation webinar scheduled exclusively during business hours on the second Thursday of each month.

"We heard the American people when they said they wanted their voices heard," said a spokesperson for the Office, who asked not to be named because she was, in her words, "still filling out the internal form to be authorized to speak to press." "This portal delivers exactly that. Or it will, once the fax verification queue clears."

Step One: Confirm You Are a Person (Steps Two Through Six Also Cover This)

According to the official onboarding documentation — a 214-page PDF titled Getting Started: An Introduction to Beginning the Process of Initiating Your Feedback Journey — users begin by completing an accessibility and language preference survey, which itself requires completion of a pre-survey to confirm the user understood the instructions for the accessibility survey.

Identity verification follows. The portal's authentication infrastructure, built on a government contract awarded in 2019 to a firm whose website currently displays only a stock photo of a handshake, requires submitters to fax a signed copy of their identity confirmation to a toll-free number that, according to user reports on Reddit's r/CivicTech community, "rings twice and then plays what sounds like hold music from a Marriott in 1994."

Users who successfully transmit their fax — estimated by the Office at "the majority, eventually" — will receive a confirmation email within three to ten business days instructing them to log back into the portal to confirm receipt of the confirmation, at which point they may register for the orientation webinar.

The Webinar: Ninety Minutes You Will Not Get Back

The orientation webinar, titled Your Voice Matters: Navigating the MCIRE Submission Environment (Module 1 of 4), runs ninety minutes and is described in the onboarding documentation as "strongly encouraged" and, four paragraphs later, "required by statute."

Attendees who sat through the April session — one of whom agreed to speak to The Proceedings Today on condition of anonymity because, she said, "I don't want to have to redo the whole thing" — report that the first forty minutes consist of a screen-shared PowerPoint that cannot be advanced because the presenter's mouse appears to have stopped working, followed by a fifteen-minute section on portal accessibility that is itself not accessible to screen readers, and a closing Q&A in which all questions are answered with a variation of "that's a great question, and we'll be addressing that in Module 2."

Module 2 has not yet been scheduled.

Expert Commentary From Someone Who Has Never Successfully Done This

Dr. Leonard Fitch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of two books on digital civic infrastructure, told The Proceedings Today that the new portal represents "a genuinely ambitious attempt to modernize public engagement mechanisms that, in fairness, had not meaningfully changed since the Clinton administration."

Asked whether he had ever successfully submitted feedback through a federal portal himself, Dr. Fitch paused for what a transcript would record as "an uncomfortable length of time" before confirming that he had not, attributing this to "a combination of technical barriers and, if I'm being honest, a gradual erosion of the will to try."

He added that the fax requirement was, in his professional assessment, "extraordinary," and that he had not personally sent a fax since 2008, when he faxed his own home by accident.

"The underlying intention is sound," Dr. Fitch concluded. "The execution suggests the underlying intention may have been handled by a different department than the one that built the portal."

The FAQ Section, Which Answers Nothing

The MCIRE portal includes a Frequently Asked Questions page currently comprising eleven questions. These include: What is MCIRE? (answered with a link back to the homepage), How do I submit feedback? (answered with a link to the onboarding PDF), and What happens to my feedback after submission? (answered with the sentence: "Submitted feedback enters the review pipeline, where it is processed in accordance with applicable procedures.").

The question Has anyone's feedback ever changed anything? does not appear in the FAQ, though a staffer confirmed to The Proceedings Today that it had been "considered for inclusion" before being "tabled pending further internal alignment."

A separate section of the portal — labeled Success Stories — currently contains one entry, dated November 2022, in which a resident of Akron, Ohio reports that she successfully submitted a comment about rural broadband access and received an automated acknowledgment email with a reference number. She notes, in the final line of her testimonial, that she has not heard anything since.

Democracy: Now With a Reference Number

Officials at the Office of Public Engagement expressed confidence that early adoption rates would improve once awareness of the portal increased, and once the fax queue situation had been "looked into by the relevant team."

A phased rollout of MCIRE's remaining features — including a comments section, a response mechanism, and what the documentation describes as a "potential notification system" — is expected to begin sometime in the next fiscal year, contingent on appropriations, interagency coordination, and the resolution of a trademark dispute over the acronym that the Office declined to elaborate on.

In the meantime, citizens wishing to make their voices heard are encouraged to complete the pre-survey, locate a fax machine, and register for the May webinar, which has not yet been confirmed but is, according to the portal's calendar function, "tentatively pending."

The comment period for feedback on the new feedback portal closes June 30th. Submissions must be faxed.

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