President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday creating a new post for the government’s chief design officer and is tapping Airbnb Inc. co-founder Joe Gebbia to fill the position, according to people familiar with the matter.
The move would give Gebbia a leading role in redesigning government forms and processes through a new National Design Studio to be housed at the White House. The people familiar spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the selection before it is publicly announced.
Gebbia, 44, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
His mission as the nation’s first chief design officer will be to “prioritize improving websites and physical sites that have a major impact on Americans’ everyday lives,” according to the text of the executive order released by the White House. That mandate could include income tax filings, Social Security applications, Medicare enrollment, immigration services, and other high-volume government services.
Gebbia, a holdover from Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk’s largely dismantled Department of Government Efficiency, has already led an effort to overhaul the government’s cumbersome retirement process.
Until recently, the Office of Personnel Management relied mostly on papers kept in an abandoned limestone mine in Pennsylvania to calculate retirement benefits for federal employees.
In an interview with Bloomberg News in June, Gebbia described much of the federal bureaucracy as a “design desert.”
Earlier this year, Trump abolished an Obama-era office known as 18F that worked on digital design projects across the federal government. The new group will report directly to the White House chief of staff and have a deadline of July 4, 2026 to deliver initial results.
