In one of the more unexpected fusions of Silicon Valley and Washington, President Donald Trump has appointed Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia as the first-ever Chief Design Officer of the United States, leading a new National Design Studio (NDS). The move, part of Trump’s “America by Design” executive order signed on 21 August 2025, signals an ambition to overhaul how Americans experience government services - starting with the 26,000 federal websites most people dread using.

The headline promise? Make dealing with government feel more like browsing the Apple App Store than fighting through DMV paperwork.

📊 Supporting Stats & Context

The federal government currently operates 26,000+ websites across agencies - many outdated, inconsistent and inaccessible (Reuters, 2025).
A Forrester survey (2023) ranked the US government last out of 13 industries for customer experience, behind airlines and even health insurers.
By comparison, Airbnb - where Gebbia cut his teeth - manages 150m+ users globally and built one of the most design-forward consumer platforms of the 2010s.
The executive order sets a July 4, 2026 deadline for first results, tying into America’s 250th anniversary - a symbolic (and highly visible) milestone.

🧠 The Brand Opportunity

This isn’t just about clean fonts and slick UI. For Trump, it’s a brand play: reframing government as something modern, intuitive and - crucially - customer-centric. For Gebbia, it’s the ultimate design brief: reimagine the world’s biggest and least loved “brand” (the US government) in a way that restores trust and reduces friction.

Design has long been treated as window dressing in government. This role elevates it to strategy, placing experience design on par with economics and policy. It’s an acknowledgement that in the digital era, user experience is political capital.

⚠️ Challenges Ahead

Bureaucratic Resistance
Agencies are siloed, budgets are rigid, and design changes often get watered down by compliance and legacy systems. Convincing civil servants to prioritise UX over process will be a cultural battle.
Scale & Consistency
Unlike Airbnb’s single platform, federal websites are fragmented. Aligning 26,000 sites to a unified design language without stifling agency-specific needs is a herculean task.
Politics of Aesthetics
Design choices - colours, language, symbols - can quickly become partisan lightning rods. What looks “modern” to some may be framed as elitist, woke, or exclusionary by others.
Delivery Deadlines
The July 2026 deadline ties success to a spectacle. Fail to land a big, visible change by the Semiquincentennial, and the initiative risks being remembered as cosmetic PR.
Trust vs. Style
The real measure won’t be whether sites look better, but whether citizens feel they can trust and navigate them more easily. In other words: substance over gloss.

📌 Key Takeouts

What happened: Trump launched America by Design, appointing Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia as Chief Design Officer.
What worked well: Bold recognition that design is not cosmetic but central to how people experience government.
The risk: Bureaucracy, politics, and scale could dilute the vision, reducing it to branding rather than transformation.
What it signals: Experience design is being positioned as a lever of national strategy, not just commerce.

🔮 What We Can Expect Next

If Gebbia succeeds, expect a new era of civic UX, where applying for benefits, visas, or business permits could feel as intuitive as booking a flight. Other governments may follow, making design a frontier of national competitiveness.

But failure is equally instructive. If “America by Design” collapses under politics and bureaucracy, it will be a cautionary tale of how design-led thinking struggles outside corporate walls.

Either way, the experiment is historic: a Silicon Valley design mind taking on Washington’s hardest brief. If the US government can be rebranded through user experience, the ripple effect across policy, politics and commerce could be profound.