On March 1, 2025, in a series of late-night mass firings, the federal government eliminated 18F, the digital-services agency launched in 2014 to bring modern, user-centered design to government technology. More than 90 staff were labeled “non-essential” and dismissed without warning as part of sweeping “efficiency” purges under the Department of Government Efficiency.
These layoffs sparked immediate backlash and former staffers scrambled to preserve 18F’s resources, insisting, “We came to the government to fix things. And we’re not done with this work yet.” Their words captured the devasting loss of an agency created to make government more accessible and trustworthy. All of the work that 18F accomplished was dismantled nearly overnight.
The creation of 18F had not been accidental. It grew out of the catastrophic failure of Healthcare.gov in 2013, when a national embarrassment over a broken federal website forced policymakers to acknowledge that digital services are as essential to democracy as roads and schools. The agency’s designers and engineers were recruited from across the tech sector to prevent that kind of collapse from happening again, and for more than a decade, they succeeded.
Earlier this week, the administration introduced a new design initiative titled America By Design. (For eagle-eyed designers, yes, this name was already taken.) Airbnb co-founder, Joe Gebbia, was appointed as the nation’s first Chief Design Officer and is now charged with leading the National Design Studio. Reporting directly to the White House Chief of Staff, Gebbia is tasked with revamping both digital and physical government services.
Gebbia, who stepped back from Airbnb in 2022 and resigned as board chair in early 2025, had already been working within DOGE on modernizing retirement processes. His mandate is ambitious: to make government services as seamless and intuitive as the best consumer platforms, with improvements promised across as many as 26,000 federal websites by July 4, 2026.
As a response to this effort, the America by Design Fail website was just launched as a response to these contradictions. It serves as a sobering record of what was lost—the dismantling of an effective, mission-driven public design team, juxtaposed against the promise of a slick Silicon Valley-led studio. Its message is heartbreaking: the government had already built meaningful capacity for digital transformation, only to discard it before announcing a renewed commitment to design. (At this time of this post, the creators of this website are unknown.)
Design is not an afterthought in government; it is the bridge between policy and the people it serves. The mass firing of 18F severed that bridge just as it was proving its worth. Bringing in Joe Gebbia may generate headlines, but without continuity, institutional knowledge, and a respect for the hard-earned lessons of civic design, the promise of America by Design risks becoming little more than a slogan. The tragedy is not that design is being elevated, but that it had to be destroyed first.
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