Attempting to meet Donald Trump’s July 2026 deadline to refashion government websites where private information is shared, the National Design Studio is creating websites that have all the appearances of leaving gaping security holes, experts warned Monday.
According to a report from NOTUS, the president demanded in an executive order for the websites to be “usable and beautiful,” but the early results are raising alarms among security experts.
“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,” the experts said, with one raising a red flag about the coding and an over-reliance on AI.
Noting that one of the founders of Airbnb has become the point man, or the “chief design officer,” for the administration for approval, digital designer Christopher Butler cast doubt on whether the websites contain necessary protections.
“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,” he remarked. “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 warned, “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.”
That falls in line with earlier reports that the employees of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency created nothing but chaos within the Social Security Administration when making changes at the agency.
Anna Cook, a web product designer and accessibility specialist, reviewed one early iteration coming out of the project and stated she found a “heavy reliance on unedited AI-generated content.”
Remarking that it used “either AI or sloppy code,” she warned, “At minimum, a qualified tech team would have at least fixed these issues before pushing the sites into production.”
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