CNBC reported today, “Pres. Trump, Elon Musk & Admin Officials Announce New AI-Powered All-Inclusive Gov’t. Website.” It’s literally breaking news— President Trump’s formal announcement starts this morning, probably while you are still reading this. CMS Director Mehmet Oz said the initiative was “intentionally kept under wraps.”
CLIP: Dr. Oz explains the federal government’s one-stop web portal for all things government (3:39).
There are over 29,000 websites in the Federal Government. Remarkably —and I am not making this up— the federal government is voluntarily attempting to make its websites usable.
At an all-day event at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium —a grand building that makes the local DMV office look like a toolshed— the Trump administration is unveiling America.gov, what it calls an AI-powered “front door” to the federal government. One website. One search box. Every agency behind it. Passports, name changes, Social Security questions, Medicare conundrums, IRS inquiries— you can start any of them from one spot.
C-SPAN called it an “all-inclusive government agency hub” — all-inclusive, like a Caribbean resort, except instead of unlimited shrimp it’s unlimited federal questions. A White House official called it a “one-stop shop” for Americans hunting down information and services currently scattered across “a maze of various agency websites.”
To launch the new website, the administration is assembling: the President of the United States, the Secretaries of State, Agriculture, and Energy, the administrator of Medicare and Medicaid, the administrator of NASA, the richest man in the world, personal improvement mogul Tony Robbins, and a complete card deck of tech leaders.
The assembled notables are kind of like the Bureaucratic Avengers, plus Dr. Oz playing Dr. Strange, all gathered to heroically unveil a website. Don’t scoff— all Avengers are important. The Secretary of Agriculture, for instance, is key, even if a lesser star in the constellation, like Hawkeye.
The man in charge of the actual design is Joe Gebbia, Airbnb’s co-founder, now the nation’s very first Chief Design Officer, running the new National Design Studio. This is the first genuinely encouraging sentence in the whole story. The federal government’s websites were not designed. They accreted, like coral reefs, or arterial plaque. Somewhere out there is a federal form that only works in Internet Explorer, and Internet Explorer has been dead for years, and the form does not care. The form has achieved a state beyond death. The form is eternal.
Gebbia’s diagnosis was blunt and correct: Americans have spent decades wrestling with “clunky, often inefficient and overly complex government systems.” His prescription is a single portal with an AI assistant as the primary interface— you describe what you need, in plain human language, and the machine navigates the bureaucracy for you. Earlier reporting said officials have considered letting people do things like renew their passports and file their taxes through it, which means the chatbot’s first real test will be answering the only question anyone has ever asked a government website: where is the actual form?
It only took 250 years.
Gebbia enthusiastically called the project “the golden age of the citizen experience,” and a “new chapter of usability for the country.” He said the team set out to answer a simple question: “How do you make it easy to just access government?” (They waited nervously after saying that out loud, but did not, in fact, burst into flames.)
Citizen, savor that phrase: the golden age of the citizen experience. For most of American history, “the citizen experience” of dealing with the federal government has meant the hold music. The PDF that won’t download. The office that is open Tuesday through Thursday, 9 to 11, except federal holidays and the entire month of August. The website that demands a password with fourteen characters, one hieroglyph, and the blood of a turnip, then locks you out for 24 hours because you forgot to put your middle initial.
A golden age of that would be an improvement the way a hospital is an improvement over a battlefield amputation. Technically and literally true. Let’s go.
If the Airbnb guy can make renewing your passport as easy as booking a treehouse in Oregon, that is a genuine public good, and this column will say so, right after it finishes making fun of the password requirements.
But just wait for the Corporate Media coverage. You already know how it will go. The same outlets that spent years during every Republican administration reporting that the federal government’s Byzantine requirements are a mystifying exercise in self-flagellation will now explain why fixing them is a disgrace. Expect experts to surface within hours to warn that a single, easy-to-use government portal is a privacy nightmare, a surveillance panopticon, possibly the end of democracy itself.
(Unlike the current system, in which our data is scattered across hundreds of agency websites built by Al Gore during the first Clinton administration, which is apparently the safe, democratic way to do it.)
Tomorrow I will cover how the corporate media dismissed the new website as incomplete, not really very helpful at all, and how it fails to provide accommodations for people who identify as lawn squirrels.
If it works, though, it could be the first serious advance in helpful government and reduced friction in our lifetimes, at least since they started letting us wear our shoes going through airport security again.
I will say this: if America.gov’s chatbot can explain why the IRS keeps telling me I owe $647.32, despite having paid it twice, I will include a month of free advertising on my substack page on Coffee & Covid. Promise made. Your move, feds.
