On August 21, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that could reshape how Americans interact with their government, both online and in person. The order, which establishes a National Design Studio and appoints Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia as the nation’s first chief design officer, marks a bold attempt to overhaul the usability and aesthetics of federal digital and physical services. The initiative, dubbed “America by Design,” is a sweeping response to long-standing frustrations with clunky, outdated government websites and forms that have confounded citizens for years.
According to Reuters, the new National Design Studio will be housed at the White House and led by Gebbia, who will report directly to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. The studio’s mission? To coordinate agency actions, reduce duplicative design costs, and use standardized frameworks to enhance the public’s trust in high-impact government services. Federal agencies are under the gun to “produce initial results” by July 4, 2026, a deadline that the administration hopes will inspire urgency and measurable progress.
President Trump’s order is explicit about the challenge at hand. Less than 20% of federal websites currently use the U.S. Web Design System (USWDS), a community-driven codebase designed to help agencies maintain a consistent, user-friendly digital presence. The result, as noted by NDTV, is a patchwork of federal sites that offer wildly inconsistent user experiences. Shockingly, only 6% of these websites have achieved a “good” rating for mobile performance—a glaring problem in a country where smartphones are the primary gateway to the internet for millions.
“There is a high financial cost to maintaining legacy systems, to say nothing of the cost in time lost by the American public trying to navigate them. It is time to fill the digital potholes across our Nation,” Trump stated in the executive order, as reported by NDTV and Bloomberg. The order’s language is clear: Americans deserve digital and physical experiences that are both beautiful and efficient, and improving the quality of life for the nation is now a matter of policy.
Joe Gebbia is no stranger to ambitious design challenges. Best known for co-founding Airbnb, he’s already dipped his toes into government modernization. Earlier in 2025, Gebbia helped revamp the federal retirement process at the Office of Personnel Management—a system so outdated that paperwork was still being stored in a decommissioned limestone mine in Pennsylvania. By February, thanks to his efforts, the process had finally gone digital. “Excited to share I’m bringing my designer brain and start-up spirit into the government. My first project at DOGE is improving the slow and paper-based retirement process,” Gebbia wrote on X (formerly Twitter) in February, as cited by Bloomberg.
In a March interview with Fox News, Gebbia didn’t mince words: the old retirement process was “an injustice to civil servants who are subjected to these processes that are older than the age of half the people watching your show tonight.” He’s made it clear that the government’s digital services can—and should—be transformed into an “Apple Store-like experience.” In June, speaking with Bloomberg News, Gebbia described the federal bureaucracy as a “design desert.”
The creation of the National Design Studio comes on the heels of the collapse of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a controversial Trump-era body led by billionaire and former adviser Elon Musk. DOGE’s original mandate was to shrink the federal payroll, close down agencies, and modernize outdated government systems. However, after Musk’s acrimonious split with Trump in May, DOGE’s activities dwindled to almost nothing, according to India Today. The new studio is widely seen as a “stripped-down successor” to DOGE, but with a sharper focus on design quality, user experience, and standardization—rather than just cost-cutting.
The executive order also instructs the General Services Administration (GSA) to collaborate with the new chief design officer to update the USWDS and ensure compliance with the bipartisan 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act (21st Century IDEA). That law, passed in 2018, already requires agencies to modernize their websites, digitize services, and improve customer experience. Yet, as the Biden administration’s final-year review revealed, there’s still a long way to go. Over half of federal websites had improved their metrics, but issues like feedback mechanisms, search optimization, design consistency, and accessibility remained stubbornly unresolved.
Gebbia’s appointment signals a shift toward recruiting top private-sector designers and working hand-in-hand with agency heads to address these persistent gaps. The National Design Studio will not be a permanent fixture; its work is set to wrap up after three years. But the expectations are high—especially for websites and physical sites that “have a major impact on Americans’ everyday lives,” which will be prioritized for updates, as emphasized by the White House in statements to Bloomberg and NDTV.
Some critics point out that the Trump administration previously halted certain Biden-era projects aimed at improving government websites, such as the IRS’s free tax-filing tool. Former IRS Commissioner Billy Long, who left the agency in August, had announced in July that the program would be discontinued. This history has left some observers skeptical about the administration’s commitment to digital accessibility and public service, despite the new initiative’s promising rhetoric.
Still, the bipartisan roots of the 21st Century IDEA and the ongoing interest in digital modernization suggest that there’s broad support for making government services more user-friendly. The Biden administration’s own efforts laid some groundwork, and the Trump administration is now pushing for a more coordinated, design-driven approach. Whether this will finally bring U.S. government websites into the 21st century—or just add another layer of bureaucracy—remains to be seen.
For now, all eyes are on Joe Gebbia and the National Design Studio as they take on the daunting task of turning the federal government’s “design desert” into a landscape that’s as functional as it is beautiful. If they succeed, Americans might one day find that interacting with their government online is as easy—and maybe even as pleasant—as booking a vacation rental.
