Airbnb’s cofounder chosen as Chief Designer Officer of the U.S.

With the signing of a new executive order, President Donald Trump has for the first time in U.S. history established an office exclusively dedicated to improving the design of public administration: the National Design Studio (NDS), headed by the Chief Design Officer (CDO). The role has been entrusted to Joe Gebbia, Airbnb co-founder and member of Tesla’s board of directors. According to the government’s website, this appointment marks a decisive shift in the management of digital services within federal agencies, which are expected to become more user-friendly, “beautiful and efficient”, placing design at the center as a factor of national identity and cohesion. Never before has a figure from the design world entered the presidential structure with such a well-defined role and political visibility.

The initiative, titled “America by Design,” aims to redesign approximately 26,000 federal websites, making them – in Gebbia’s words on X – “as satisfying to use as the Apple Store: elegantly designed, with excellent user experience, and built on modern software”. The plan will particularly focus on digital and physical services with high impact on citizens’ daily lives: from Internal Revenue Service (IRS) procedures to Social Security, passport renewals, and even college application systems, often criticized as obsolete and outdated.

This is not Gebbia’s first involvement with government. In the past, he contributed to modernizing retirement processes within the controversial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), created by Trump and led by Elon Musk. The NDS appears to inherit that mission, aiming to reduce design costs while introducing a model of standardized, high-quality design into federal services.

However, this is not the first time a U.S. president has set up a special task force to integrate arts and design into government strategy. As early as the 1970s, in fact, Richard Nixon asked the National Endowement for the Arts to work on guiding principles and aesthetic recommendations to devise a new federal architecture and improve the graphics of its publications.

Today, as openly stated by the programmatic manifesto of “America by Design" posted on the government website, Donald Trump seems more interested than ever in claiming continuity with that policy of support and integration, promising to do even “better” than Nixon: “What's the biggest brand in the world? If you said Trump, you're not wrong. But what's the foundation of that brand? One that's more globally recognized than practically anything else. It's the nation ... where he was born. It's the United States of America.. [...] This is the hospitality design for our nation. This is President Trump going bigger than President Nixon”.

Opening image: photo by René DeAnda on Unsplash.