Editor's note: This article is posted with permission from the anonymous author who shared it with us.
The recently published americabydesign.gov site follows a design-focused Executive Order from August 21st, 2025. Let’s take a quick tour!
Upon visiting the site, you’re immediately greeted by text inexplicably placed atop a flag-waving background video and content indistinguishable from a sycophantic prompt engineer’s triumphant output after some back-and-forth with their favorite toady AI. I’m not trying to be an annoying buzzkill here. This is literally the first sentence introducing America by Design:
America by Design, a project apparently associated with Edward Coristine of DOGE, is claimed by the newly established National Design Studio.
On the surface, this appears to be a reversal of one of the very first moves that DOGE took under the Trump administration: Minimizing the importance of good design in government digital service delivery. Could this be something to celebrate?
Cutting through the fluff, the grotesque and out-of-place praise of the “Trump brand”, a nod to President Nixon, and misplaced ellipses, America by Design aims to paint a picture of the United States where modernization has resulted in a series of services that surprise and delight. It even lists a series of government interactions associated with high-profile projects that folks might recognize:
I’ll cherry-pick a couple of examples from that list that I’ve already personally interacted with:
- Renew your passport
- Manage your Social Security
- File your taxes
Renewing your passport online is something I hope many Americans have had the opportunity to do. I was fortunate enough to do so myself when the service was piloted several years ago. Even then, when the pilot had some rough edges, I was ecstatic to have completed the application from the comfort of my own home. A former lead designer from the United States Digital Service (USDS) authored a lovely write-up of the process, starting back in 2018, which you could read here.
Social Security is not something I’ve had to manage closely just yet, but millions of Americans who rely on Social Security are having worse user experiences as a result of this administration’s SSA policies. Citing fraud and abuse as justification, they’ve planned disproportionate changes that add barriers to accessing benefits, particularly for disabled, elderly, less tech-savvy, and/or rural recipients. Good design is about building trust, not undermining it; creating an uphill battle for America by Design, which claims to want experiences for Social Security recipients to “exceed expectations.”
Filing your taxes – online, for free, with the IRS and state departments of revenue directly? This seemed like a pipe dream not long ago. Today, taxpayers across the country have had access to IRS Direct File for two filing seasons. Direct File’s 2024 and 2025 filing seasons were unmitigated success stories. Take a look at the pilot season’s After Action Report or the Filing Season 2025 Report to learn more about the experience and tax accuracy that made the tool so popular with its users. Former lead designers of Direct File made their research publicly available (slides and accompanying demo video), which outlines why users loved their tax filing experience. Yes, you read that right, taxpayers who used Direct File reported that they enjoyed filing their taxes. This is because Direct File was designed with its users all across the country, prioritizing their needs first.
The team also shared a partially redacted snapshot of the Direct File codebase with the open source community, which the COCOMO model estimates to be worth $27 million in organic development value.
Speaking of Direct File, I’m going to take a quick detour. You’ve probably seen numerous articles predicting or misrepresenting the program’s fate. Everything from DOGE intending to kill the program, to Elon Musk generating confusion with an unspecific tweet indicating that he “deleted” the group at 18F supporting Direct File (he had not), to one of a half-dozen IRS commissioners under the Trump administration’s first six months declaring the program “gone”. Despite all of this, some of the original minds behind Direct File refuse to throw in the towel and are formulating a plan for a future, even if the program comes to an end under the Trump administration. At the time of writing, no end to the Direct File program has been ordered, though its fate may be intertwined with the report mandated by the “One Big Beautiful Bill”, slated to be completed later this year. Either way, America by Design seems to hint at some replacement for this perfectly well-functioning tool.
Let’s be clear: Despite DOGE acting in opposition to Direct File, the already-existing answer to one of America by Design’s stated priorities, taking a beloved service away is not “America by Design”, it is Destruction by Design.
Getting back on topic, you’ll notice a theme here: Generous and resilient civic technologists (and let’s be very clear: professional, trained designers, some of the best in their field) sharing their research and process that led them to creating the very services that DOGE and now America by Design want credit for. These individuals were already dedicated to delivering the best possible experiences for users interacting with their government in the United States, but were not valued by the current administration. Most were fired without cause months before America by Design was launched. You can see the optics problem here, right? Suddenly claiming to care about design after disregarding your greatest assets makes this whole initiative impossible to take seriously.
My point here is not to criticize the new National Design Studio before we’ve had a chance to see what they can do. I’m an optimist by nature, despite being given increasingly few reasons to be optimistic about the future of civic technology under the Trump administration. I’m justifiably skeptical due to the repeated disregard for user and human-centered design, and what appears to be an attempt to simultaneously disparage and take credit for the work of those who paved the way.
As an engineer, I can appreciate building new, lean systems and processes. There is tremendous opportunity for an America by Design in the wake of the needless wrecking ball that DOGE’s titular, yet oxymoronic claim of “efficiency” brought. However, the National Design Studio will have to wade through mountains of rubble, and it would be all too easy to neglect key elements of good design that ensure public services serve the entire public.
Let’s take a look at accessibility, for example. The Trump administration’s culture war has placed a target on accessibility, a fundamental aspect of delivering usable services. A former Direct File lead designer aptly noted in a blog post about some of their previous work that designing accessible-first with an equity-centered approach results in universal improvements:
Instead of looking at an accessibility effort as helping, say, “only 3% of the population”, consider that it actually helps 100% of the population at least a little and 3% of that even more.
Unfortunately, America by Design’s landing page and the Executive Order that originated don’t mention accessibility as a priority. In fact, they don’t mention accessibility or the importance of accessible government services at all. The United States Web Design System, championed under the Biden administration as an efficient, universal foundation for accessible, modernized government websites, is only mentioned once in this new Executive Order. The directive for USWDS involves vague “updates” with the goal to ensure that it is “consistent with the policies set forth” in the Executive Order. If the America by Design landing page (which does not use the USWDS, by the way) is an indicator of accessibility’s relative priority to the prominently featured grovelling branding slop, it’s not looking good. The rotor menu, which helps sight-impaired users understand and navigate the structure of a webpage, lacks landmarks due to missing semantic elements that typically structure a basic web page.
Closer inspection of the semantic elements reveals questionable webpage markup structure, wherein every word of the main content resides in its own doubly-nested span, presumably a side effect of prioritizing animation over readability:
I’m not trying to be pedantic. I just want to stress that this stuff is important. It’s important to take pride in your craft, to care about your product, and, crucially, to care about the people who will use it. I understand, perhaps, not publicizing accessibility as a priority, given the administration’s public brand of hostility to the concept; however, actually neglecting it when the time comes to do the work will make your services unusable for some and worse for all. The civic technologists who started these initiatives are still out there, continuing to do the good work, as are the resources and archives of everything they have learned and shared. For the future of America’s digital age, you don’t have to start ten steps behind the present. It’s possible for even the wrecking crew to rebuild, but let’s ensure we do it right.