Tuesday marked the launch of America.gov, a new AI-powered website built to serve as the singular entry point to the federal government. At the event, President Trump signed an executive order establishing the site.
The portal searches information across roughly 29,000 government websites and returns answers based on official federal sources. It is powered by artificial intelligence from Google’s Gemini and Elon Musk’s Grok, according to U.S. Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia, who spoke to CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Who Built America.gov
The National Design Studio (NDS) was set up through Executive Order 14338, which Trump signed on Aug. 21, 2025, and its main product is America.gov. The General Services Administration (GSA) runs the site, managing much of the federal government’s technology.
The studio’s leadership comes from Gebbia, who joined NDS in February 2025, having founded Airbnb and served as a longtime associate of Musk. Akash Bobba, part of the studio’s head of engineering, is Edward Coristine, the DOGE staffer known as “Big Balls,” who was 19 when he joined the government. Another young engineer from DOGE’s original core team followed him to NDS.
Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) sits at the center of both NDS and the GSA’s operations. The project quietly came to an end in May, following Musk’s exit from the executive office amid a disagreement with Trump.
The Staff Cuts Behind It
The GSA cut more than 1,000 workers and set a target of reducing staff by 63 percent in its Public Buildings Service division. It also ended 18F, a technology consulting unit inside the GSA.
In early 2025, DOGE rolled out a custom AI-powered chatbot, GSAi, to around 1,500 government workers. One employee told WIRED the tool gave “generic and guessable answers.”
What the Site Does Now
Phase 1, the present stage, centers on accelerating access to government information. The About page identifies it as the current phase. Phase 2, scheduled for 2027, will extend the experience with features such as applying, enrolling and tracking progress all within the chat itself.
The administration wants to make the tool bigger so that people can start or finish tasks including renewing passports, signing up for Medicare, looking at student-loan details and booking federal campsites.
The site provides answers in three languages: English, Spanish, and French. It also allows voice input using a microphone icon and gives step-by-step guidance for tasks such as passport renewals. Users can upload a PDF of a form or letter to receive assistance with reading government documents.
The site says it doesn’t retain conversations, though some answers may be cached for up to 2 hours. It also says it doesn’t save names or IP addresses.
What the Chatbot Says
The site’s chatbot refused to address questions that didn’t concern federal government subjects. After Mashable put it to the test, it rejected queries that strayed from that domain. When pressed about the winner of the 2020 election, the chatbot confirmed that Joe Biden had secured victory. When asked whether Trump appears in the Epstein files, the response was an affirmative.
The site’s answers were confirmed by PBS NewsHour, which arrived at the same conclusions on both points. Simply appearing in the files does not prove wrongdoing, and Trump has denied it.
The Privacy Problem
In June, The Guardian discovered that sites already deployed by the team behind America.gov were using commercial tools for tracking user behavior and data. None of those tools appeared to comply with the Privacy Act.
WIRED reported that NDS jobs don’t appear on USAJobs, the federal government’s hiring portal. That means the jobs are not posted where federal workers typically look for openings.
What This Means for Users
The administration says the site is up and running as a quicker route through federal red tape. Whether it actually works that way depends on how good its answers turn out to be.
The group behind it has a track record of putting out tools that users found lacking. When GSAi came out, it offered generic answers, and the site’s own privacy disclosures raise questions about what becomes of the data it gathers.
America.gov has been pitched by its backers as a revival of America’s founding promise. It is not yet clear whether it will actually function that way.
The website is now up and running at america.gov, and the White House is pushing it as the fresh approach for interacting with the federal government. Its success will hinge on accuracy of the answers and protection of the data.
Where the paper stands
The paper backs narrow rules against direct harm, such as forcing companies to disclose safety failures they hid, and is against broad rules that hand the market to the incumbents, as well as any single point of access that gathers too much power in one place. The paper sees America.gov as a test case for both dangers at once: a concentrated power point that lets one company’s software become the sole way to reach the government, and a system built by a studio whose leaders come from a company with its own ambitions rather than from public service.
The paper’s fear is not of AI itself but of power gathering in one place. A single entry point to government — one website, one chatbot, one set of answers — hands too much control to whoever controls it. The paper backs light regulation of technology so startups are not frozen out, not a single gatekeeper that decides what questions can be asked and what answers are given. The Guardian’s finding that deployed sites used commercial tracking tools that did not comply with the Privacy Act shows the risk: a government site built without regard for its own laws.
The paper wants the market open to smaller firms and individuals, not locked behind a few giants. It wants transparency on failures, not secrecy. The paper would want America.gov’s designers to answer for how they chose which AI systems to use, who decided which answers the chatbot gives, and whether the site’s promises about what it does not collect match what it actually does. The paper wants the public to know who is running the government’s digital door and how they got there, before the door closes behind them.
Key Facts at a Glance
- America.gov launched Tuesday
- Trump signed an executive order establishing it during the event
- The site searches 29,000 government websites
- It is powered by Google’s Gemini and Elon Musk’s Grok
- Phase 2 adds applying, enrolling and tracking progress in 2027
- The GSA operates the site
- DOGE alumni lead the project
- The chatbot answered Biden won the 2020 election and confirmed Trump’s name in the Epstein files
- The site says it doesn’t retain conversations or save names/IP addresses
The launch serves as a declaration of purpose. Its ultimate value will be determined by the answers it generates and the faith users choose to invest in it.
Source material: “Trumps AI-powered America.gov is here. It was built by DOGE alumni and runs on Grok.,” Mashable.
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