A White House Office of Ex-DOGE Engineers Is Taking Over Federal Websites.

A White House office called the National Design Studio is rebuilding the federal websites Americans use to register to vote, renew a passport, and prove their identity to the government. The office is staffed largely by engineers from DOGE, it reports directly to the White House Chief of Staff, and a Guardian investigation published June 28, 2026 found its sites running hidden tracking software, carrying none of the privacy disclosures federal law requires, and spending money that appears in no public record.

What the National Design Studio Is

President Trump created the studio by executive order on August 21, 2025, under an initiative called “America by Design.” The stated goal was to modernize how government websites look and work.

The placement is the part that matters. The studio was put inside the White House, not in any single federal agency, and its administrator reports to the Office of the White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles. It was given authority to coordinate digital projects across the entire federal government. Its chief design officer is Joe Gebbia, the Airbnb co-founder, who was originally set to join DOGE before standing up his own office.

Staffed by the Engineers Who Ran DOGE

DOGE was disbanded in November 2025. As it wound down, its engineers were reassigned across the government, and several landed at the National Design Studio.

Edward Coristine, the DOGE staffer known online as “Big Balls,” is listed on the studio’s website as its head of engineering. Greg Hogan, another DOGE veteran, now runs Login.gov, the identity-verification service that lets people prove who they are across dozens of federal agencies. Akash Bobba, also from DOGE, works on the studio’s voter registration project and is listed as the official security contact for a separate federal agency under an ndstudio.gov email address.

The same small group that spent 2025 cutting through federal agencies now builds and operates the digital front doors to those agencies.

Agency Systems Now Run From the White House

The studio’s reach goes well past appearance. It has built White House-controlled versions of services that Congress assigned by law to specific agencies.

A working copy of vote.gov was registered to the Executive Office of the President, not the Election Assistance Commission, the independent agency Congress created to run it. A passport site is owned by the White House rather than the State Department, and it is already collecting biometric passport photos. Login.gov, the government’s identity-proofing service, now answers to a former DOGE engineer inside this office.

When a system moves into the White House, it leaves behind the protections that come with agency control. Inspector general review, agency privacy rules, and congressional reporting requirements do not follow it across the threshold.

Built to Track, Without the Required Disclosures

The Guardian’s analysis found commercial visitor-tracking software, made by a company called PostHog, embedded in four of the studio’s sites: ndstudio.gov, trumprx.gov, realfood.gov, and trumpaccounts.gov. The software’s session-recording feature can replay every click, scroll, and keystroke of a visit. It was switched on for two of the sites, and on the other two it sat one setting away from active.

Two laws were written for exactly this situation. The Privacy Act of 1974 requires agencies to publish a System of Records Notice describing what personal data they keep and why. The E-Government Act of 2002 requires a privacy impact assessment before the government deploys tracking technology. A search of the Federal Register for the National Design Studio returns no System of Records Notice at all.

Funded and Contracted in the Dark

The money is as hidden as the tracking. The studio’s funding, staffing, and contracts do not appear in USAspending, the public database that normally records federal contracting.

There is no public record of how much the studio costs, which outside vendors it hires, or who handles the data flowing through its sites. For an office now operating passport and voter systems, that absence is the whole problem. The public cannot check what it cannot see.

What the White House Says

The White House defends the office as a service upgrade. It told the Guardian that the studio’s personnel “comply with all applicable legal requirements” and that the goal is simply to improve how Americans interact with their government.

The documented record sits in tension with that statement. A System of Records Notice is an applicable legal requirement, and there is none on file. A privacy impact assessment is an applicable legal requirement, and none has been produced.

Why It Matters

This is a structural change, not a redesign. The systems that decide whether you can register to vote, get a passport, and prove your identity are being pulled into a single White House office staffed by the people who ran DOGE, beyond the reach of the watchdogs built to check them.

The people closest to the work are uneasy about it. One studio engineer, briefing state election officials on a recorded call about how the voter system handles data, conceded, “I don’t know what they retain and what they are logging.” A person quoted in the Guardian investigation put the stakes plainly.

“It’s dangerous and it’s going to erode trust.”

Source quoted in The Guardian, June 28, 2026

Identity records and election data are the most sensitive a government holds. Concentrating them in an office with no inspector general, no published privacy notices, and no visible budget removes every normal way for the public to know how they are used.

What You Can Do Now

Use the letter below to ask your members of Congress to put the studio under real oversight. The specific asks are a Government Accountability Office audit of its funding and contracts, Privacy Act and E-Government Act compliance before its sites stay online, and returning voter, passport, and identity systems to the agencies Congress assigned to run them.
Call your senators and representative at (202) 224-3121. Ask them to demand a public hearing with the studio’s leadership, including Joe Gebbia, under oath, and a full list of its vendors and contracts.
Register to vote through your state’s official election office, not a federal portal. Your state site is the safest place to register. Find it at usa.gov/voter-registration.
File a records request. Submit a FOIA request through FOIA.gov for any agreements between the State Department, the General Services Administration, or the Election Assistance Commission and the National Design Studio.