For years, advocacy groups made it easy for Americans to weigh in on federal regulations. If a proposed rule threatened internet freedoms or environmental protections, organizations could set up simple campaign sites: Type your comment, hit submit, and your feedback went straight into the federal record. During the 2017 net neutrality fight, more than 1.6 million comments reached the Federal Communications Commission in a single day.
That era just quietly ended.
As 404 Media first reported, the General Services Administration (GSA), which runs regulations.gov, abruptly disabled the “Post” function on its public API (that is, the software gateway that lets outside applications talk directly to a government website). Until last week, groups could batch-submit comments collected on their own websites. Now, only federal agencies can use the tool. Attempting a submission returns a 403 error (access denied).
The GSA offered only a brief email notice and no real explanation, according to 404 Media. The official alternative—navigating regulations.gov directly—is a slog, requiring users to track down the docket number, complete a lengthy form, provide personal details, upload files, and clear a captcha (a test to determine whether the user is human).
The difference may sound like a minor technical hurdle, but in governance, access is everything. Rule-making only works as a democratic mechanism if ordinary people can take part without needing specialized knowledge or legal help. By raising the friction, the government is effectively narrowing the field to insiders, lawyers, and industry lobbyists—the very groups that already dominate policymaking. (GSA did not respond to Fast Company‘s request for comment.)
Advocates say the effect of the API change is obvious: Civic participation will shrink. Public comment periods are one of the few channels through which citizens can weigh in on decisions that shape markets, workplaces, and daily life.
“The API allows members of the public to engage with rules without having to navigate this really frustrating, user-unfriendly website,” said Liz Zepeda, the federal regulatory director of the Southern Environmental Law Center. Without it, she added, “it’s just that much harder for them to make their voices heard.”
Zepeda sees the change as part of a broader trend. “There is definitely a pattern of this administration skirting around transparency and oversight tools,” Zepeda said. Across the federal government, agencies are shortening comment periods, skipping proposed-rule stages, and even letting regulatory websites crash or drop information. Instead of engaging with large volumes of critical feedback, she warned, officials are “just making it harder for people to submit those comments at all.”
Matt Lane, senior policy counsel at Fight for the Future, traced the government hostility toward the comments feature back to the battle over net neutrality, when telecommunications companies were caught flooding dockets with fake submissions. Since then, he said, industries have pushed to “neutralize public participation, because it makes them look bad. It really seems like it grew out of that moment in particular.” (And agencies are actually required to read and respond to every comment.)
The burden won’t hit everyone equally. Shutting out easy digital access mostly hurts ordinary people, while corporations with deep pockets and teams of lawyers will likely keep filing comments as usual. “The companies that care, they hire people who know how to work the system,” Lane said. “They pay lawyers. And if not for groups like ours encouraging greater public participation, they’re the only voices agencies are going to hear.”
And unfortunately, most people will probably never realize a backend function disappeared in the first place. “Thousands of people have used this API functionality and had no awareness,” Zepeda said. “They won’t notice it disappearing, but they just won’t see these easy opportunities to seamlessly get on the record.”
The early-rate deadline for Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies Awards is Friday, September 5, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.
