TBPN · Oct 2, 2026
With Joe Gebbia, Chief Design Officer of the United States
Photo: Ryan Lowry, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Joe Gebbia's team measured the process for replacing a lost Social Security card: 87 clicks, done correctly the first time.
Most government modernization stories are about a single agency's website getting a facelift. Gebbia's team is trying to delete the question of which government website to use entirely, folding 29,000 separate federal sites into one.
"We looked at the flow of the replacement of our Social Security card. It's 87 clicks to replace that piece of paper."
Gebbia co-founded Airbnb and spent a decade building trust into a marketplace of strangers renting each other's homes. About eighteen months ago he joined DOGE, and he now runs the National Design Studio, the unit building America.gov.
The full segment is covered here so you can skip it.
Here are the 5 moments that matter.
Key Takeaways
Replacing a lost Social Security card currently takes 87 clicks, done correctly the first time
His team is building a one-click replacement flow inside America.gov
29,000 separate federal websites are being folded into one, america.gov, which only pulls from official government sources
A paper-based federal retirement process went from six months to about six seconds after his team took it online
Americans spend an estimated 10 billion hours a year dealing with government processes, a figure he calls the whole reason the project exists
Multiple states and, in the past three days alone, several other countries have asked how to copy the approach
1. One Site Instead Of 29,000
John Coogan asked Gebbia to explain his role at the National Design Studio and how a redesign project actually moves through a system built on decades of separate agency websites.
The starting problem was scale: nobody can modernize 29,000 sites one at a time
"There's now 29,000 government websites of all shapes and sizes." — Joe Gebbia
The fix was to replace navigation with one searchable, actionable front door
"What if there was just one website where people could go to search for the information that they need and also action it?" — Joe Gebbia
He gave an example: searching which Medicare plan fits a grandparent, then enrolling in the same place rather than being routed back into each agency's own site.
Because it sits inside government, the system is restricted to government sources on purpose
"So the interesting thing is that because we're in the government, our LLM is only official government sources, which means that we only return information that's published from the government. We don't scrape the Internet." — Joe Gebbia
