America by Design, Again
President Trump signed an executive order creating America by Design, a national initiative to improve the usability and design of federal services, both digital and physical. The order establishes a National Design Studio inside the White House and appoints Airbnb co-founder and RISD graduate Joe Gebbia as the first Chief Design Officer. The studio’s mandate: cut duplicative design costs, standardize experiences to build trust, and raise the quality of government services. Gebbia said he aims to make the U.S. “the most beautiful, and usable, country in the digital world.”
Ironically, this follows the gutting of the US Digital Service, left like a caterpillar consumed from within by parasitic wasp larvae, when it was turned into DOGE. And as part of the cutting of thousands from the federal workforce, 18F, the pioneering digital services agency that started in 2014, was eliminated.
Ethan Marcotte, the designer who literally wrote the book on responsive design and worked at 18F, had some thoughts. He points out the announcement web page weighs in at over three megabytes. Very heavy for a government page and slow for those in the country unserved by broadband—about 26 million. On top of that, the page is full of typos and is an accessibility nightmare.
In other words, we’re left with a web page announcing a new era of design for the United States government, but it’s tremendously costly to download, and inaccessible to many. What I want to suggest is that neither of these things are accidents: they read to me as signals of intent; of how this administration intends to practice design.
The National Design Studio has a mission to turn government services into as easy as buying from the Apple Store. Marcotte’s insight is that designing for government—at scale for nearly 350 million people—is very different than designing in the private sector. Coordination among agencies can take years.
Despite what this new “studio” would suggest, designing better government services didn’t involve smearing an animated flag and a few nice fonts across a website. It involved months, if not years, of work: establishing a regular cadence of user research and stakeholder interviews; building partnerships across different teams or agencies; working to understand the often vast complexity of the policy and technical problems involved; and much, much more. Judging by their mission statement, this “studio” confuses surface-level aesthetics with the real, substantive work of design.
Here’s the kicker:
There’s a long, brutal history of design under fascism, and specifically in the way aesthetics are used to define a single national identity. Dwell had a good feature on this in June…
The executive order also brought on some saltiness from Christopher Butler, lays out the irony, or the waste.
The hubris of this appointment becomes clearer when viewed alongside the recent dismantling of 18F, the federal government’s existing design services office. Less than a year ago, Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative completely eviscerated this team, which was modeled after the UK’s Government Digital Service and comprised hundreds of design practitioners with deep expertise in government systems. Many of us likely knew someone at 18F. We knew how much value they offered the country. The people in charge didn’t understand what they did and didn’t care.
In other words, we were already doing what Gebbia claims he’ll accomplish in three years. The 18F team had years of experience navigating federal bureaucracy, understanding regulatory constraints, and working within existing governmental structures—precisely the institutional knowledge required for meaningful reform.
Butler knew Joe Gebbia, the appointed Chief Design Officer, in college and calls out his track record in government, or lack thereof.
Full disclosure: I attended college with Joe Gebbia and quickly formed negative impressions of his character that subsequent events have only reinforced.
While personal history colors perspective, the substantive concerns about this appointment stand independently: the mismatch between promised expertise and demonstrated capabilities, the destruction of existing institutional knowledge, the unrealistic timeline claims, and the predictable potential for conflicts of interest.
Government design reform is important work that requires deep expertise, institutional knowledge, and genuine commitment to public service. It deserves leaders with proven track records in complex systems design, not entrepreneurs whose primary experience involves circumventing existing regulations for private gain.
If anything this yet another illustration of this administration’s incompetence.
