The National Design Studio (NDS), an opaque White House office staffed largely by veterans of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), has quietly rebuilt sensitive federal websites for passport applications, voter registration, prescription-drug pricing, and children's savings accounts. Critics say the redesign appears to violate federal privacy laws.
Tracking Software on Federal Sites
A Guardian investigation found that the NDS installed commercial visitor-tracking software called PostHog on four public federal websites: ndstudio.gov, trumprx.gov, realfood.gov, and trumpaccounts.gov. The software was configured to evade adblockers and other privacy tools by routing analytics requests through the federal website's own address. PostHog's session-recording feature can replay every click, scroll, and keystroke of a visitor's session. On Trump Accounts and TrumpRX websites, this feature was built into the page code and held inactive only by a single setting in PostHog's dashboard, which the NDS could change at any time.
After the Guardian contacted the White House with questions on 4 June, the NDS apparently removed the tracking software. White House spokesperson Liz Huston responded on 17 June: "All National Design Studio personnel comply with all legal requirements in their important work to improve how citizens interact with their government."
Bypassing Federal Agencies and Oversight
The NDS has built White House-controlled versions of services that Congress assigned to other agencies. This includes a passport-application portal that bypasses the State Department's existing site, and a copy of vote.gov, the federal voter-registration site that by law belongs to the independent, bipartisan Election Assistance Commission (EAC). The studio's version of vote.gov is live on White House systems and uses Login.gov for identity verification, with citizenship checks against a Department of Homeland Security database.
John Davisson, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), said: "It's dangerous and it's going to erode trust." He added that the studio's approach creates "a whole sort of second skunk-works version of the federal government with all these shady tracking technologies and outside of the parameters of normal federal privacy laws."
Lack of Transparency and Legal Compliance
None of the NDS's spending or contracts appear in USAspending, the federal contracting database. The studio operates as a "temporary organization" within the executive office of the president, placing it outside Senate confirmation, financial disclosure, and inspector general oversight. The NDS failed to publish privacy impact assessments or system of records notices required by the E-Government Act of 2002 and the Privacy Act of 1974. Davisson called this "a pretty clearcut violation of section 208" of the E-Government Act.
Serge Egelman, research director of the Usable Security and Privacy Group at the International Computer Science Institute, noted the arms race between data collection and privacy tools, citing a lawsuit where Meta's Pixel was placed on the California DMV website. He said: "It's not like someone going to the DMV website expects a private company to receive their personal data and then be allowed to use that however they want."
Staffing and Leadership
The NDS was created by a Donald Trump executive order in August 2025 and is led by Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, who serves as chief design officer. Gebbia, a former Democratic donor who voted for Trump in 2024, spent about six months at Doge in early 2025. The studio is staffed under the same hiring authority that ran Doge, with figures like Greg Hogan (in charge of Login.gov) and Akash Bobba (one of Musk's original six Doge engineers) among its personnel.
Reactions from State Election Officials
During a briefing with state election directors in October 2025, members expressed "serious concerns with this project not complying with state law." Brianna Schletz, the EAC's executive director, reportedly told state directors that conversations were "informal" and that commissioners would later vote on participation. No such vote has appeared in public proceedings. The EAC chair, Donald Palmer, said the commission was "facilitating discussion with state election officials on modernizing an accessible tool to provide a verifiable digital registration option."
Questions remain about data retention and White House access to voter registration data. Akash Bobba reportedly told state officials: "I don't know what they retain and what they are logging."
