One of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency types who burrowed into the Trump administration after Elon Musk left is now the nation’s first “chief design officer.” Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia is going to turn your government into the Apple Store.
No, really. That’s what he said.
Gebbia was initially tasked with a “digital design challenge” to revamp the retirement process for the Office of Personnel Management, but now he’s going to bring his big brain to the whole of government. So, he’s spinning up a new temporary agency, the fascist-monikered “National Design Studio,” which is seeking … volunteers? Come work for free for the federal government to help yet another Big Tech billionaire do whatever it is they are doing! What a sales pitch.
The alleged tech savant is supposed to unveil some initial results of his redesign of 26,000 websites by July 4, 2026, because of course President Donald Trump has to tie it to his jingoistic fetishizing about the 250th birthday of the country.
Trump’s executive order setting all this stupidity in motion whines about how the nation has “lagged behind in usability and aesthetics” and that he will now “fill the digital potholes across our Nation.” What?
Meanwhile, the National Design Studio website blares, “The USA stands for freedom, independence, and dreams, yet to those who live here, the government is known for being slow, hard to use, and often stuck in the past.”
This is just the modernized version of the long-held and infinitely discredited conservative belief that the government doesn’t work and would be best run like a business. But even past Republican administrations weren’t this blinkered about it and willing to literally just let CEOs with zero experience in government run the place into the ground.
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All of this high-minded talk about how important it is for people to have better access to government services is really rich coming from an administration that has made the experience of interacting with the government so much harder.
For example, one of the first tasks Gebbia is assigned: improve the user experience at the Internal Revenue Service. You know what would be a great user experience for most regular folks? DirectFile, the government program that gave people a free, simple way to file their taxes. But the Trump administration killed that so it could keep lining the pockets of the big commercial tax preparation companies who back Trump.
You know what else would be a great user experience for most regular folks? Short wait times when contacting the IRS. But the agency is now lying about how long taxpayers have to wait to talk to someone, per the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.
Hmm. Perhaps lying about wait times is an Apple Store Genius Bar policy, and that’s what Gebbia means? Surely letting a billionaire who coughed up a lot of money to weirdo libertarians before swearing fealty to the Trump administration has the best interests of the little people in mind, right?
Besides the fact that Gebbia really only seems to be tasked with papering over what the administration has irretrievably broken, it’s maddening to have to pretend that this notion of using technology to make government run better is something Trump just thought of right off the dome, a genius idea no one else ever had.
And by the way, we already had a whole government agency dedicated to that. Trump shuttered it.
But where a door closes, a window opens and, in this case apparently, another Trump-loving billionaire just slides on in. So efficient!