Note the sketchiness of https://passports.gov as it exists today in particular.

My personal take is that the administration has had no problems taking over digital/physical infrastructure in undemocratic and authoritarian ways. And, the fact that this "design studio" is creating staging sites for some of the most sensitive government services like voter information and passports is ominous even when we don't know exactly what the contents are of their redesigns. If you take a straight reading of the executive order there are 1,000 other websites that they could start their work on that are far far worse to use than https://vote.gov and https://usa.gov/passport.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/impr...

Does the following story make sense?

- The agencies will take ninety days just to approve the "voter list creation committee"

- The plan is for the DOGE-equivalent to create example sites from AirBnB templates so that when the deadline approaches they can say "Here, adopt this code so you can make the deadline. You'll need to replace the certificates".

- Thus it's true that the agencies are still in the deliberation phase. It's the national design studio that is prototyping.

The piece documents a variety of related illegalities, but to cobble together an excerpt around the one in the title:

> After Florida 2000, Congress passed a law [...] that voter registration cannot live inside the White House of any sitting president. [...] today vote.gov is registered to the Election Assistance Commission. [...] But in the certificate logs [...] was a working preview of vote.gov [...] dated April 10. DOJ told a federal court the infrastructure does not exist. Both of those cannot be true. Either DOJ lied to a federal judge, or the studio is building a replacement for the country’s voter registration site without telling the agencies whose work it would replace. There is no third option.

Oof. I really don't like the idea of making all regular government access gated through the office of one dude who claims his position (at least, only when he's in it) is literally above consequences for breaking the law.

Imagine the abuses of the No Fly List, but orders of magnitude worse. Publish a negative article about the regime, whoops, now somehow you can't log into any government site anymore, how strange, how sad.

> When the federal government collects information about citizens, the law requires specific things first. Privacy disclosures. Notices in the Federal Register. Published contracts with outside vendors. I went looking for all of it across twelve National Design Studio programs and found none of it, not a single required document filed across any of the twelve. Every missing document is, by itself, a violation of federal law, and these are the laws Congress wrote after Watergate to make sure the federal government could not run secret surveillance programs on its own citizens.

So this leads us to the classic "malice or incompetence" question... I want to nip that in the bud. Over the past few years we've seen that there is a kind of pathological input which gives the algorithm unbounded runtime. If you can't decide quickly, then the correct answer is both, unless and until the miscreant wants to plead one or the other.

> The National Design Studio was created by executive order in August 2025. [...] Its leader is Joe Gebbia, cofounder of Airbnb

This is, incidentally, a Ycombinator company, which I think adds adds a little bonus HN relevance.

P.S.: I don't understand why the submitter's comment is [dead].