The National Design Studio is a Scam

Joe Gebbia has no business designing government services.

President Trump’s appointment of AirBnB co-founder Joe Gebbia as “Chief Design Officer” of the United States is a sickening travesty. It not only proves a fundamental misunderstanding of both design and governance, but an unbound commitment to corruption.

Gebbia’s directive to make government services “as satisfying to use as the Apple Store” within three years might serve as an appealing soundbite, but it quickly collapses under the slightest scrutiny: why? how? with what design army? The creation of the so-called National Design Studio and Gebbia’s appointment as its chief should raise serious questions about credentials, institutional destruction, and continued corruption.

Design by Regulatory Arbitrage

Gebbia’s reputation in design rests on a shaky foundation. AirBnB’s present dominance isn’t the product of real innovation. He and his friends stumbled upon an idea after listing their apartment on Craigslist for under-the-table sublease during a popular conference. They realized money could be made, and built a website to let other people do the same thing, through them, not Craig. Good on them, but renting a space is regulated differently than selling a used couch for many good reasons. What you could once attribute to the same quaint naivety of setting up a lemonade stand, you can no longer. The people who funded them knew better, and eventually, so did they.

What AirBnB does today is no different, other than the legitimization that comes with lots of capital and a slick app. But let’s be clear: The innovation was never about design, it was about collusion: spend enough to ensure that regulatory enforcement costs more; spin enough to make theft look heroic. With Y-Combinator as a launchpad, the company rapidly built its business by systematically ignoring well-established regulations in hospitality and real estate. This sounds like a perfect match for the Trump Administration, and it’s why I cannot take any of Gebbia’s commitments now at face value. His formative business experience taught him to break existing systems rather than designing better ones, and for that he was rewarded beyond anyone’s wildest imaginations.

True design requires understanding constraints, working within complex systems, and serving users’ actual needs rather than exploiting regulatory gaps. Gebbia’s track record suggests a fundamentally different approach — one that prioritizes disruption over responsibility and profit over genuine public service. I’m not sure he can differentiate between entitlement and expertise, self and service, commerce and civics.

Institutional Vandalism

The hubris of this appointment becomes clearer when viewed alongside the recent dismantling of 18F, the federal government’s existing design services office. Less than a year ago, Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative completely eviscerated this team, which was modeled after the UK’s Government Digital Service and comprised hundreds of design practitioners with deep expertise in government systems. Many of us likely knew someone at 18F. We knew how much value they offered the country. The people in charge didn’t understand what they did and didn’t care.

In other words, we were already doing what Gebbia claims he’ll accomplish in three years. The 18F team had years of experience navigating federal bureaucracy, understanding regulatory constraints, and working within existing governmental structures—precisely the institutional knowledge required for meaningful reform.

Now we’re expected to believe that dismantling this expertise and starting over with political appointees represents progress. Will Gebbia simply rehire the 18F professionals who were just laid off? If so, why destroy the institutional knowledge in the first place? If not, how does beginning from scratch improve upon what already existed? It doesn’t and it won’t. This appointment has more in common with Trump’s previous appointment of his son-in-law to “solve the conflict in the Middle East,” which resulted in no such thing unless meetings about hotels and real estate counts.

Gebbia knows as much about this job as Kushner did about diplomacy, which is nothing. Despite years in “design,” I suspect Gebbia knows little of anything about it, or user experience, or public service. His expertise is in drawing attention while letting robbers in the back door.

Impossible Promises, Probable Corruption

The timeline alone reveals the proposal’s fundamental unseriousness. Gebbia promises to reform not just the often-cited 26,000 federal websites, but all government services—physical and digital—within three years. Anyone with experience in government systems or even just run-of-the-mill website design knows this is absurd. The UK’s Government Digital Service, working with a much smaller governmental structure, required over a decade to achieve significant results.

But three years is plenty of time for something else entirely: securing contracts, regulatory concessions, and other agreements that benefit private interests. Gebbia may no longer run AirBnB day-to-day, but his wealth remains tied to the company. His conspicuous emergence as a Trump supporter just before the 2024 election suggests motivations beyond public service.

Trump has consistently demonstrated his willingness to use government power to benefit his businesses and those of his collaborators. There’s a growing list of “business-minded” men granted unfettered access and authority over sweeping government initiatives under Trump who have achieved nothing other than self-enrichment. AirBnB has already disrupted hospitality; their next expansion will likely require the kind of regulatory flexibility that only comes from having allies in high government positions. Now they’ve got a man on the inside.

The Pattern of Capture

This appointment fits a broader pattern of regulatory capture, where industries gain control over the agencies meant to oversee them. Gebbia’s role ostensibly focuses on improving government services, but it also positions him to influence regulations that could significantly impact AirBnB’s business model and expansion plans.

The company has spent years fighting local zoning laws, housing regulations, and taxation requirements. Having a co-founder in a high-level government design role—with access to federal agencies and regulatory processes—creates obvious conflicts of interest that extend far beyond website optimization.

Beyond Personal Grievances

Full disclosure: I attended college with Joe Gebbia and quickly formed negative impressions of his character that subsequent events have only reinforced.

While personal history colors perspective, the substantive concerns about this appointment stand independently: the mismatch between promised expertise and demonstrated capabilities, the destruction of existing institutional knowledge, the unrealistic timeline claims, and the predictable potential for conflicts of interest.

Government design reform is important work that requires deep expertise, institutional knowledge, and genuine commitment to public service. It deserves leaders with proven track records in complex systems design, not entrepreneurs whose primary experience involves circumventing existing regulations for private gain.

The American people deserve government services that work better. But interacting with government could not – and should not — be more different from buying something at the Apple Store. One is an interface layer upon society – an ecosystem of its own that is irreducible to a point and inextricable from the physical and philosophical world in which it exists. The other is a store. To model one after the other is the sort of idiocy we should expect from people who either understand little to nothing about how either thing should work or just don’t care. I suspect it’s both.

Christopher Butler, August 27, 2025  
Filed under: Essays