After announcing Friday it will no longer voluntarily release visitor logs, the White House is considering eliminating the popular petitions site We the People.

A decision to end the service would be seen as a setback for accountability by many critics of President Donald Trump, but as the end of a soft-news gimmick by others.

The site, launched on the White House website in 2011, was deftly used by the Obama administration to generate positive press. Since January, it has served largely as a sounding board for Trump opponents.

More than 1 million people, for example, have demanded that Trump publish his tax returns. Another petition that's passed 100,000 signatures – a time-sensitive threshold set by the Obama administration to earn an official response – tells Trump to resign.

None of the Trump-era petitions have been given a response, and White House Communications Director Mike Dubke tells U.S. News the site's fate is in limbo.

"This decision is still under review," Dubke says.

Cost, he says, is "always" a consideration.

Under President Barack Obama, the site was criticized by some as a propaganda tool, as petitions that challenged the administration went years without answer while goofy, softball or more politically convenient ones got a response.

Nate Lubin, director of the White House Office of Digital Strategy from 2013 to 2015, says the site would have value even if the Trump administration gave skimpy non-answers.

“That would be unfortunate – but it would be better than nothing,” he says. “As we experienced when I was there, there were certain petitions that we could not give substantive responses to, for legitimate reasons. The main point, though, is that any White House should be following a commitment to giving the people a chance to tell leadership what they think.”

Lubin says third-party petition sites like Change.org, Avaaz and MoveOn aren’t equal alternatives unless there’s some new commitment to issue responses.

And cost-savings, he says, would not be a convincing rationale for ending the site.

“Most costs, regardless, relate to expanding features or improving the tools [and] even if they chose not to invest in improving the platform, maintaining the status quo should be well within their budgets,” Lubin says.

Still, a White House official last week cited relatively meager savings of $70,000 through 2020 to justify nixing Open.gov, a website that hosted White House visitor logs.

Dave Karpf, a George Washington University media and public affairs professor, says he's not surprised the Trump White House is considering elimination of the petition service.

"The Trump administration has abandoned every other piece of the transparency agenda, so it seems like only a matter of time until they scrap We the People as well," he says.

"We the People functioned best for the Obama administration when it was (a) well-staffed and (b) produced high-traffic petitions that either aligned with the Obama agenda or surfaced new issues that could be included in the Obama agenda," Karpf says in an email.