NOTUS – “For the low price of $1 million, you can apply for a new card that comes with exclusive perks and is marketed with a sleek website featuring an animated bald eagle standing before sunlit mountains. It has all the markings of a website selling a luxury travel credit card. But it’s not. It’s the official landing page and application for a new pathway to permanent residency in the United States, the Trump Gold Card. In small print at the top of the webpage: “This is an official website of the United States government.” You may not have known otherwise. The aesthetics are courtesy of the National Design Studio, part of Donald Trump’s initiative to overhaul the federal government’s digital services — or, as the August executive order launching the project states, to make government design “usable and beautiful.”

Every agency has been ordered to consult with the chief design officer, Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, and produce “initial results” by July 4, 2026. The sites coming out of the National Design Studio might look slick at first glance — if not to everyone’s taste — but if the office’s early projects are a tell, pushing this aesthetic at a large scale could risk breaking federal disability laws and compromising the security of Americans’ personal data, former federal web developers and design experts told NOTUS. “If government’s going to be for all the people, then the websites that we use to access our services from government need to be usable by all,” one former federal employee who worked on web design said. “Some of these sites feel like another round of ‘move fast and break things.’” NDS has made two websites for itself, NDStudio.gov and AmericabyDesign.gov. One of the office’s first projects outside of building pages advertising its own work was for the Trump Gold Card. The team is also behind Genesis.energy.gov, which promotes a new artificial intelligence initiative at the Department of Energy, and TrumpRx.gov. The latter website, promising to “connect patients directly with the best prices,” features an image of a child with six toes holding his mother’s hand as they run across a beach — toward a U.S. flag that has mysteriously lost its stars. The picture appears to be AI-generated. Design elements like that are giving designers pause. If a photo is AI-generated, what else is? And what could that mean for Americans’ data?..”