The White House is ducking a high-profile petition calling on Donald Trump to release his tax returns.

The petition has attracted more than 1.1m signatures and is arguably the highest-profile item among a backlog of requests of the government from ordinary Americans, which has been piling up at the White House.

After more than a year with little response on the backlog, the administration is addressing the raft of petitions submitted on the White House website.

The website, known as “We the People”, was launched by the Obama administration in 2011.

The site was briefly taken down by the administration last year but was relaunched in late January.

The White House says the tax-return question “is not within the scope” of the government feedback tool because the issue “does not address an action or policy of the federal government”.

The tax petition reached the 100,000-signature threshold for a response on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, after being a persistent topic during the presidential election.

The administration has, meanwhile, declined to respond to a petition calling on the president to place his financial holdings in a blind trust.

In addition to protest coming from Trump opponents, the website has also been embraced by conservatives looking to push their priorities.

The White House addressed an August 2017 petition seeking to declare as a terrorist organization “AntiFa”, a loose collection of self-proclaimed anti-fascist activists whose occasionally violent protests attract national headlines. The White House said Trump opposes violence but that federal law provides no “mechanism for formally designating domestic terrorist organizations”.

The administration has received dueling petitions on money for the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, which the president has sought to strip of public money. One petition wants the funding preserved, another calls for defunding the programs, as Trump requested in his 2018 budget request.

Another key petition awaiting a response opposes the Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of net neutrality regulations last year. Another calls for scrapping the 1934 National Firearms Act, which categorizes weapons for federal registration.