Last year, the first iteration of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) began to wind down with billionaire Elon Musk’s departure from government in June 2025. But a new entity, led by yet another tech billionaire, emerged much more quietly less than two months later: the National Design Studio (NDS).
NDS is headed by Joe Gebbia, the cofounder of Airbnb who now serves as the country’s chief design officer. Its mission is to redesign government websites to make them “beautifully designed” with a “great user experience,” according to Gebbia. But NDS retains many of the hallmarks of DOGE, including some of its team members, an opaque structure, and a seeming lack of adherence to the way many rules and systems in the federal government work. As it continues hiring, WIRED spoke to an engineer who interviewed for a position with the agency.
“I don’t want to come off as a prude and say it was deeply unprofessional, because I’ve had plenty of casual interviews,” says the engineer who interviewed for the job and who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. “But it was casual to the point where I don’t think there was any process established.”
Like DOGE, NDS is nested under the Executive Office of the President. Though the NDS website says that the group is hiring, there is little information about the roles and seemingly no way to apply for the jobs from the website. NDS jobs also do not appear on USAJobs, the hiring portal for the federal government. Similarly, DOGE also solicited applications through a separate website, and before President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, via direct message on X.
Gebbia has long been a close associate of Musk’s, and joined DOGE in February 2025. As DOGE members dispersed across the government and private sector, NDS became a landing spot for some of DOGE’s key operatives. Edward “Big Balls” Coristine and Akash Bobba, both of whom WIRED identified as part of the cadre of young engineers who formed the early core of DOGE, have both ended up at NDS. Coristine, who was 19 years old when he joined the government and had reportedly been terminated from an internship at a network monitoring firm known for hiring reformed blackhat hackers, after being suspected of leaking internal information, is now the group’s head of engineering.
It’s not always clear who is a part of NDS, and in what capacity. Zachary Terrell, a former DOGE affiliate who is currently serving as chief technology officer at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), also “contributes” to NDS, according to his website. Bobba retained a position as an “unpaid expert appointment” at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) until March 7, 2026, more than six months after he reportedly moved over to NDS, according to documents filed in a lawsuit by the American Federation of Government Employees, a union that represents federal workers. The White House, NDS, HHS, and OPM did not reply to requests for comment.
An engineer who recently interviewed for a job with NDS, and who has previously worked in government, told WIRED that their interview with NDS was unlike any interview for a government job they’ve ever had. The engineer, who currently works in the private sector, hadn’t applied for a job with the group. Instead, they received a cold pitch from Coristine inviting them to have a conversation about a role with NDS. “We’re taking the leap to create agentic experiences where Americans can get things done with their government,” Coristine wrote, saying he was looking for “very talented and hardcore engineers who can ship.”
“I have no idea how they got my contact information,” says the engineer. Unlike other interviews for government jobs, the engineer says, there was no recruiter present—only Coristine was on the interview call. “Normally initial screenings are done over the phone, rather than video, to reduce bias in the process,” they say.
During the engineer’s NDS interview, they say, Coristine didn’t seem to know the skill set he was looking for. “I generally don’t know if this person is capable of evaluating a full-stack engineer,” they say, “because they themselves aren’t aware of the skill sets, tools, and things needed in this profession.” Coristine did not reply to a request for comment. (In January 2025, Coristine was one of several DOGE members who interviewed workers at the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services, who were required to defend their jobs and justify their projects. At the time, employees who spoke to WIRED described meetings in which the DOGE members were not familiar with their work.)
Coristine told the engineer that the role was geared toward supporting what would become Rampart, a tool released in late June to prevent personally identifiable information (PII) from leaving a user’s browser, particularly if they’re using something like a chatbot. In an interview with the Technology Business Programming Network (TBPN) podcast, Coristine described the project as a “side quest ” and told the engineer that the NDS team of about 30 people did not include a machine-learning engineer.
The tool is similar to OpenAI’s browser-based “privacy filter,” which can detect things like a personal email, address, or account number, and mask them automatically. But exactly how this tool is meant to be used in the context of government services is unclear. In the interview with TBPN, Coristine did not offer any particular examples, though he noted the tool is significantly smaller than OpenAI’s, making it potentially more accessible in lower-bandwidth environments.
“It feels very counterintuitive because in most instances, when you are asking for PII, you want PII,” says the engineer, noting that in government work, a user might need to provide PII like their social security number or address in order to access government benefits. “You don’t want that information redacted.”
In many cases, developers can choose to encrypt certain fields that an API sends to the backend of a website, and websites that use HTTPS connections to communicate with their backends also encrypt their requests.
This is not the first time the Trump administration has tried to reinvent the wheel of government technology. Last year, as DOGE promised government efficiency through technology, its members fired technologists who were already working on exactly the kinds of projects it purported to want, even killing a flagship product in the Internal Revenue Service’s free tax filing tool. An OPM memo published last week instructed agencies to prioritize hiring technical talent.
“This does feel superfluous. My most optimistic speculation is that this is indicative of an organization that has no goals,” the engineer says, noting that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) regularly supports the creation of tools to solve complex technical problems around issues like privacy. “Why are these guys who are so closely associated with the White House wasting tax money on this little hacker project?”
Though NDS members don’t seem to be getting access to the kind of sensitive government data that DOGE operatives were, the organization has still come under scrutiny for possibly violating users’ privacy. In June, The Guardian reported that NDS appeared to be building new government websites where users would enter sensitive information, including for passports and voter registration. The sites that NDS had already deployed were using commercial tools that did not appear to comply with the Privacy Act to track user behavior and data. Voter registration is handled by the states, and the website through which Americans can apply for passports has historically been run by the State Department and not the White House. In a conversation with the National Association of Secretaries of State, where Bobba discussed the voter registration website, he reportedly told attendees, “I don’t know what they retain and what they are logging.”
This is an edition of Hugo Lowell’s Inner Loop newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
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