‘Sloppy’ Code and Accessibility Issues: The Trouble With Trump’s Silicon Valley-Inspired Web Design Project

For the low price of $1 million, you can apply for a new card that comes with exclusive perks and is marketed with a sleek website featuring an animated bald eagle standing before sunlit mountains.

It has all the markings of a website selling a luxury travel credit card. But it’s not. It’s the official landing page and application for a new pathway to permanent residency in the United States, the Trump Gold Card.

In small print at the top of the webpage: “This is an official website of the United States government.” You may not have known otherwise.

The aesthetics are courtesy of the National Design Studio, part of Donald Trump’s initiative to overhaul the federal government’s digital services — or, as the August executive order launching the project states, to make government design “usable and beautiful.” Every agency has been ordered to consult with the chief design officer, Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, and produce “initial results” by July 4, 2026.

The sites coming out of the National Design Studio might look slick at first glance — if not to everyone’s taste — but if the office’s early projects are a tell, pushing this aesthetic at a large scale could risk breaking federal disability laws and compromising the security of Americans’ personal data, former federal web developers and design experts told NOTUS.

“If government’s going to be for all the people, then the websites that we use to access our services from government need to be usable by all,” one former federal employee who worked on web design said. “Some of these sites feel like another round of ‘move fast and break things.’”

NDS has made two websites for itself, NDStudio.gov and AmericabyDesign.gov. One of the office’s first projects outside of building pages advertising its own work was for the Trump Gold Card.

The team is also behind Genesis.energy.gov, which promotes a new artificial intelligence initiative at the Department of Energy, and TrumpRx.gov.

The latter website, promising to “connect patients directly with the best prices,” features an image of a child with six toes holding his mother’s hand as they run across a beach — toward a U.S. flag that has mysteriously lost its stars. The picture appears to be AI-generated.

Design elements like that are giving designers pause. If a photo is AI-generated, what else is? And what could that mean for Americans’ data?

Once TrumpRx launches in 2026, users will be able to click through the site to purchase their medications — which means that, on the back end, site administrators could theoretically see which medications which people are taking.

“If I do it through a pharmacy and an actual health care provider, they’ve been going through the requirements for HIPAA compliance for decades,” Christopher Butler, a digital designer, said. “I don’t necessarily trust that the guy from Airbnb has any background in that, and the ‘DOGE bros’ have any care for that.”

Butler went to college with Gebbia, who joined DOGE early in the Trump administration.

“They are part of a class of organization in Silicon Valley that basically moved in like pirates on established forms of business that were highly regulated,” Butler said of Gebbia and his team.

Gebbia left Airbnb in 2022, but remains on the company’s board of directors; Forbes estimates his net worth to be $8.3 billion. He didn’t respond to a request for comment from NOTUS.

The design chief has made it clear that he thinks the federal government could stand to learn a few tips from Big Tech’s approach to design.

“We really believe that the government can have an Apple Store-like experience, beautifully designed, great user experience, modern systems,” he said on Fox News in March.

Gebbia has been joined so far by a small number of former DOGE staffers, including Edward “Big Balls” Coristine (who was once fired by a cybersecurity firm for leaking company secrets, Bloomberg reported earlier this year), Zachary Terrell and Kaitlyn Koller.

Bringing the “disruptor” approach to federal design could have serious consequences because the stakes are so much higher, Butler said. “That’s beyond design. That’s about data integrity … Protecting data on one end, encrypting it on another, all those things; that’s a highly technical problem to solve,” Butler said.

Until recently, the federal government employed a small agency’s worth of people who specialized in solving exactly those problems at 18F, an office within the General Services Administration whose mission statement was to “partner with agencies to build prototypes, web applications, and software that model ways to use modern technology methods and practices used by top technology companies.”

In March, 11 years after its founding, GSA shut down 18F, saying it had been determined to be “non-essential.”

The former federal web design employee put the difference in ethos between public and private design simply: “In the private sector, you don’t have to design for everyone.”

“You can decide that it’s OK if only a certain segment of the population finds your website accessible and useful and easy to understand, because if you’re in the private sector, you know your corporate imperative is to make money,” they said.

The National Design Studio has already ventured into health care and immigration. The office was called out by name in a November executive order targeting foster care. The order says the National Design Studio will help create a “‘Fostering the Future’ online platform to help individuals who have been in foster care by assessing their current needs, providing guidance” and “generating customized plans” to connect users with resources.

The order demands the team create a database of federal, state and local services that would need to be accessible to anyone, regardless of their needs.

Are the National Design Studio’s websites accessible? It depends on how good your internet service is: Several of the studio’s already-launched sites require a several-megabyte download in order to show the user a single landing page, an unusually heavy lift for public sector websites.

“Imagine you’re one of the many, many people using an older phone or laptop, perhaps with a limited, pay-as-you-go data plan,” web designer, author and former 18F employee Ethan Marcotte wrote to NOTUS. “The sites built by this administration’s National Design Studio are very likely too time-consuming, or too expensive, for you to access.”

It might also depend on whether you use a screen reader to access the internet (while it’s unclear how many people do, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 7 million people in the U.S. are visually impaired).

Chris Hinds, the COO of Equalize Digital, a digital accessibility consulting company that’s worked with NASA to improve the space agency’s website, reviewed three of the NDS’s sites and said that they could be in violation of web accessibility standards; they had low-contrast errors and lacked heading structure, which makes the sites harder to read and navigate for vision-impaired people.

Federal government websites are required to follow certain standards, called Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, to comply with disability access laws like Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

“None of these sites come close to meeting that standard,” Hinds wrote in an email to NOTUS.

Those standards aren’t regularly enforced. One former federal employee who worked at the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services office told NOTUS that in theory, an inspector general could investigate whether sites created by federal entities met the legally required accessibility standards. Ultimately, though, most of the enforcement is self-imposed.

“There’s no accessibility police going around arresting people,” they said.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Anna Cook, a web product designer and accessibility specialist, reviewed the code of AmericabyDesign.gov, which details the initiative laid out by Trump’s design executive order and was created by the National Design studio, and found an apparent “heavy reliance on unedited AI-generated content.”

Several web designers told NOTUS that it’s not unusual for web developers to use AI these days — what matters is which tools are used, how they are implemented and in what context. The National Design Studio hasn’t released any documentation for its workflow and didn’t respond to requests for comment on it.

Plenty has been made of the possibility that using AI to write code could leave websites open to cyber risks — for example, if the AI coding tool relies on outdated techniques.

“The issue here is that this is the American federal government,” Cook said, pointing to what she found to be “either AI or sloppy” code. “At minimum, a qualified tech team would have at least fixed these issues before pushing the sites into production.”

But NDS isn’t currently employing more than a handful of people. Such a small team will make it difficult for the studio to meet its July 4 deadline of overhauling major sites at the federal agencies, former federal employees said.

“There’s so many steps and research to be done in order to actually improve websites,” one former 18F employee said. “The chief design officer is one person. He’s going to work with every agency in a year? No way.”

The National Design Studio may soon be getting an infusion of fresh talent, though. In late October, a bot tracking new government domain names flagged a new site, which currently leads to a sign-in page that mentions the studio. The site’s address is TechForce.gov.