Trump creates National Design Studio to modernize federal services

President Trump created a National Design Studio to be headed by a new chief design officer to enhance federal digital and physical services.

Airbnb Inc. co-founder Joe Gebbia has been tapped to fill the role, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.

Mr. Trump signed the executive order creating the studio and role on Thursday. The studio will “work to reduce duplicative design costs, leverage standardized design, and dramatically improve the quality of public interactions with government services,” the White House said.

The chief design officer will be tasked with recruiting top private-sector designers and working with other agency heads to improve federal websites and physical interfaces.”

“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,” Mr. Trump said in the order.

The National Design Studio will be housed in the White House and has a deadline of providing initial results by July 4, 2026.

Websites and physical sites that “have a major impact on Americans’ everyday lives” should be prioritized and be updated first, the White House said.

Mr. Gebbia previously worked under the Department of Government Efficiency alongside Elon Musk and was tasked with modernizing the government’s retirement process. The Office of Personnel Management used to keep retirement papers in filing cabinets in a decommissioned limestone mine in Pennsylvania, but in February, it switched to 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,” Mr. Gebbia wrote on X in February.

In March, he told Fox News that the original 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 said the government processes can be transformed into an “Apple Store-like experience.”

Mr. Gebbia, in an interview with Bloomberg News in June, said there is a “design desert” in the federal bureaucracy.