You should tell everyone on that issue. And caring about your government is not trolling. It's funny to see those suggestions, but they carry a freakin' point.
Some people deliberately use repos, issues, etc for tracking things like that in their own life, but in general it's pretty discourteous to the developers who maintain a repo about one thing (a theme for the WH site?) if you are complaining about things outside their locus of control.
You wouldn't complain to your congressperson if the White House website is broken, so complaining on the issues page of the White House web theme repo should similarly avoided.
Call your congressman. Write letters to the president. Petition on the Whitehouse homepage. Those are all more constructive ways of complaining. Venting on someone else's repo seems rude, though.
I brought this up because if you were to open source government websites and IT projects, it is also doable to create an issue tracker fills with questions and issues for congressmen, no?
We have issue tracker with issue labels. A cognressman can probably create an issue tracker like that! And update CHANGELOG.md periodically to show progress!
By the way, I wouldn't contribute to government repos myself because from my observations no one takes other people's pull request or the repo just die.
Many of these government repos are having problems because they're stuck in an old bureaucratic process. Their official process involves a static website with a list of software that has passed a review and release process. A developer will submit a bit of software for release and some other department will publish it on the website (after approval by everyone and their brother). The developer will need to perform this process for each release.
This doesn't translate well to Github. The developer will submit their software for review and another department will post it to Github. They're using Github like the static website that they used before -- there's nothing in the process that keeps the developer tied into the project once it's released. The developer may not actually have permission to their software repos because some process forces them to only release it through another department (they're definitely complaining about this, trust me). This completely breaks pull requests and may be the reason for the lack of response.
It would help the developer if they could point to Github and say: "Look at all of those pull requests we've been ignoring! Our process is broken! We must fix it!".
If external developers feel that the project is dead, or they're being ignored, pull requests will not be made. However, if there are no pull requests, it's tough for the developer to make an argument to change policy. The circle here needs to be broken.
If you've ever worked in government, you'll understand how difficult it would be to get this process updated. It will be updated eventually, but probably not in the near future -- especially for agencies that don't have a larger group of developers.
Having said that, not all government repos ignore pull requests. I manage a few "government repos" and try my best to respond/merge within 24 hours (most of my responses are under an hour -- even on weekends). It helps that we have a ton of developers who constantly push to keep things open. Even then, it was only in the past few weeks that we finally took down our static list-of-software website.
TL;DR, please don't give up on submitting pull requests. It might even help out the developer if you complain a bit to the folks responsible for "review and release" (which will probably consist of multiple departments).
And thanks for the insight.
Government gets soo bogged down in process after process, and no amount of breaking away from that gives any sort of relief. Companies _can_ be more agile and make change much quicker than government can.
I've also heard the stories from members in government. Some say that open source is evil, or insecure, or whatever.. Or another where pallets of unused supplies sit to be thrown away. Or I've also heard stories about more money thrown at a developer working in the Army that has to buy useless equipment so his budget isn't destroyed next year (and yes, he's at our hackerspace, and during shutdown).
Then again, I side with the Dems on the PPACA issue. Our health care in the US stinks. It's something in the general right direction...