This is Joe Gebbia - The United States First Design Officer. Born in Atlanta in 1981. Grew up outside the city in Gwinnett County, Georgia, selling his drawings as a kid. Studied graphic design and industrial design at the Rhode Island School of Design, then moved to San Francisco to work as a designer. In 2007, he and his roommate Brian Chesky @bchesky could not make rent. So they put air mattresses on the living room floor and rented them out to strangers during a design conference. They called it AirBed & Breakfast. With Nathan Blecharczyk @nathanblec, that became Airbnb. As Chief Product Officer, Joe built a company on one design problem: getting strangers to trust each other enough to sleep in one another's homes. Airbnb went public in 2020 at $100 billion, with millions of listings in more than 190 countries. He joined the Tesla board in 2022, sits on the RISD Board of Trustees, and signed the Giving Pledge, committing more than half his wealth to philanthropy. He never forgot where he came from. In 2021 he gave $700,000 to Brookwood High School in Snellville, his alma mater, to fund a visual arts endowment and support its athletes. The next year he spoke at graduation and gave every one of the 890 seniors 22 shares of Airbnb stock, about $2.1 million in total. He called it a small seed investment in their dreams. Then he took a government job. In 2025 he joined @DOGE with @elonmusk and took on federal retirement, a process that still ran on paper. On August 21, 2025, his 44th birthday, President Trump signed an executive order naming him the first Chief Design Officer in American history, and creating the National Design Studio (@ndstudio) for him to lead. The order called it filling the digital potholes across the nation. Joe described the goal as an Apple Store experience for the federal government: hospitality design for a country. What he inherited: 29,000 federal websites. 45% that did not work on a phone. Fewer than 20% built on a common design system. Every agency head was ordered to work with him directly. What his team has shipped since: • Safe DC, the studio's first launch. • Real Food, the first federal dietary guidelines to name ultra-processed food as the problem. • TrumpRx, 800+ medications, with the White House putting patient savings at $700 million. • Trump Accounts and its app. Starting this week Treasury is opening accounts automatically for more than 60 million babies, roughly 70 million American children total! • Federal retirement, off paper for good as of June 30. • Rampart, an open-source privacy filter that strips personal information on your own device. He recruited engineers and designers out of the best companies in the country to serve their country. And this week, one front door to the entire federal government, with a second executive order requiring every major agency to plug into it. 🇺🇸 @jgebbia

The IRS has a mobile app today because of a conversation in December. @shl had just come out of DOGE, where he wrote publicly about what he found inside the federal government. Most of it was not what people expected. His line was that the government is pretty efficient and could move faster, and that the obstacles were legal and procedural rather than a shortage of talented people. @SamCorcos recruited him to the IRS. Not as a contractor, not as a temporary detailee. As a career employee, A civil servant. At a public event that month, @shl asked the room whether the IRS should have a mobile app. Everyone said yes. Obviously yes. The IRS processes roughly 160 million individual returns a year on a system written in 1960s COBOL, and taxpayer-facing technology there has been a decade behind the private sector for most of living memory. Less than a year later, the app is live. That is the model working exactly as designed. Put builders inside the agency, and let them ship. No statement of work. No eighteen-month procurement. No vendor whose incentive is the renewal. Every agency in the federal government should be operating the same way.

This is a total hack job article. The National Design Studio ( shipped and a mobile app this year. $1,000 from Treasury into an invested account for every enrolled child. TrumpRx put most-favored-nation drug prices in front of patients directly, no middleman. launched January 7, with the first federal dietary guidelines in history to name highly processed food as the problem, plus a rebuilt food pyramid with protein, produce and healthy fats at the center. June 30 was the last day of paper at Iron Mountain, a limestone mine 230 feet underground where 10,000 federal retirement applications a month were processed by hand, and where 400 million paper records still sit. Applications that took six months to a year now clear in days. Gebbia's team shipped it after 15 years of failed attempts by everyone else. Now they're doing every government site Americans actually touch. Passports, student loans, Social Security, the parks. is next. Great job, and total patriots @jgebbia @as400495 @AdamBhaloo 🇺🇸

.@RickJacksonGA on @TrumpAccounts “I’m going to push the state of Georgia to match the federal contribution of another $1,000… If they don’t, I will personally donate it myself.” This is the way. #gapol# #gagov#