With this order, I am announcing “America by Design,” a national initiative to improve experiences for Americans, starting by breathing new life into the design of sites where people interface with their Government. It is time to update the Government’s design language to be both usable and beautiful. This effort will be facilitated by a new National Design Studio and by a new Chief Design Officer. The Chief Design Officer will help recruit top creative talent, coordinate with executive departments and agencies (agencies), and devise innovative solutions.
That sounds good actually, but, hey yo, do you remember that you fucking already had a dream-team of people doing this exact work and you fucking fired them?
GSA deputy administrator Thomas Shedd announced the elimination of 18F in an internal email that was sent early Saturday morning. In it, Shedd wrote that the team had been identified as “non-critical,” and that the cuts had been made “in alignment with the President’s Workforce Optimization EO and the recent memo from GSA per the Trump Administration requiring cutting ‘non-essential consulting’ functions.”
Not to mention the embarrassing gutting of the United States Digital Service (USDS, which had real values) and transformation into the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). DOGE had zero values. It was the mechanism to dismantle things Trump didn’t like under the veil of saving money, which of course, did the opposite.
They made a landing page for the order. Again, on the surface, it looks good. I want our government to make excellent websites that serve the people that live here. All the people, actually. Ethan has some choice words on that.
… imagine you’re one of the millions of Americans on a prepaid “pay as you go” plan, or on a home network with capped, limited data. In both cases, data overages are tremendously expensive. Now imagine you’re trying to access some critical information online — how to renew your passport, say, or to manage your Social Security — and you’re met with a web page that is literally too expensive for you to view. An overbuilt, too-heavy website isn’t exactly a rarity on today’s internet. (Sadly.) But this design is coming from the federal government, which is quite literally meant to serve every citizen — every single one of them.
The page is tacky, full of mistakes, overweight, and saturated in accessibility failures, despite having every advantage to just do it right (a one-off HTML page is usually a pretty solid starting point).
So yeah: LOL at this parody.
Did you know that the people you fired have been making tremendous, quantifiable improvements to government services? When you asked when was the last time someone’s experience with the government exceeded expectations, did you even know that the public gave Direct File a higher Net Promoter Score than Apple?
Why did you even mention filing taxes? Do you remember that you were killing Direct File? Do you remember campaigning on that?
Christopher Butler doesn’t like the new guy in charge, either, and I think makes some good points:
President Trump’s appointment of AirBnB co-founder Joe Gebbia as “Chief Design Officer” of the United States is a sickening travesty. It not only proves a fundamental misunderstanding of both design and governance, but an unbound commitment to corruption.
Gebbia’s directive to make government services “as satisfying to use as the Apple Store” within three years might serve as an appealing soundbite, but it quickly collapses under the slightest scrutiny: why? how? with what design army? The creation of the so-called National Design Studio and Gebbia’s appointment as its chief should raise serious questions about credentials, institutional destruction, and continued corruption.
I can’t get past firing all these great people from an obviously effective organization just to start it over, do nothing, and try to sound amazing doing it. It’s the most extreme hypocrisy I can imagine. Fuck him, fuck that.
