President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday afternoon setting up a new “America by Design” initiative to improve how Americans experience government online and in-person.
A new National Design Studio and chief design officer in the White House will lead the effort of “creating first-class online and offline experiences for Americans.” Federal agencies are also directed to prioritize the improvement of websites and physical places that “have a major impact on Americans’ everyday lives.
The executive order taps the newly created design chief to lead a recruiting push for designers, even as the administration has sought to shrink the size of the federal workforce and has already laid off some designers in the process.
The new initiative has some similarities with the structure of the controversial, government-slashing Department of Government Efficiency.
As with DOGE, the new design studio will house a “temporary organization,” which can bring on volunteers as well as employees and is set to end in three years.
The effort also has another commonality with DOGE in its first deadline for federal agencies — they’re to produce “initial results” by July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the pre-set end date to the temporary organization part of DOGE.
The push comes after the administration has fired and pushed out many designers from government digital talent hubs at the now-shuttered 18F at the General Services Administration, and what was formerly the U.S. Digital Service and is now the U.S. DOGE Service.
Product managers, designers and researchers were the first to be let go from USDS, according to one person familiar, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
“Basically, if you weren’t an engineer, you weren’t considered valuable,” they said.
Kate Green, a former USDS engineer and publisher of We the Builders, estimates that about 20 designers were laid off from USDS on Valentine’s Day of this year.
18F, another hub for digital services in government, was completely shut down in March. It had over 30 designers as of mid-2023, according to an archived 18F blog that said that it had “one of the largest groups of designers within the federal government.”
Under the new executive order, GSA is directed to update the government’s web design system — an open source set of web components and visual style guide for federal websites — that 18F and USDS initially created.
Agency heads are also directed to comply with the 21st Century Digital IDEA Act, a bipartisan law signed by Trump in 2018 and aimed at improving the digital experience for government customers.
Among the problems that the White House points to in the new executive order’s fact sheet is the number of federal government websites currently in existence, something the administration is working to tame already.
There are also problems with mobile friendliness and usability across many websites. All this ultimately impacts trust in government, the White House says, echoing points made by the Biden White House as part of its own customer experience push.
Improving the experiences of people interfacing with the government has long drawn bipartisan interest, although some civic tech experts have worried that DOGE has tarnished the tools that they use for the work.
