My personal take is that the administration has had no problems taking over digital/physical infrastructure in undemocratic and authoritarian ways. And, the fact that this "design studio" is creating staging sites for some of the most sensitive government services like voter information and passports is ominous even when we don't know exactly what the contents are of their redesigns. If you take a straight reading of the executive order there are 1,000 other websites that they could start their work on that are far far worse to use than https://vote.gov and https://usa.gov/passport.
Fascinating to read about the laws created to prevent this. Laws that certainly didn't anticipate corralling tech in this way. You could probably assume ignorance of these laws was the root of the failure to comply, but then you would also have to assume Gebbia doesn't understand the tech. And, those two things, as the author of the article says, most certainly aren't both true at once.
Noumenon72 1 days ago [-]
> Weeks before that certificate appeared, this administration signed an executive order requiring DHS, the Social Security Administration, and the SAVE program to construct a federal citizenship-verified voter list, with a deadline of ninety days from signing. That deadline is weeks away. When the order was challenged in federal court, the Department of Justice told the judge the agencies named had not yet begun preparation and were still in the deliberation phase
Does the following story make sense?
- The agencies will take ninety days just to approve the "voter list creation committee"
- The plan is for the DOGE-equivalent to create example sites from AirBnB templates so that when the deadline approaches they can say "Here, adopt this code so you can make the deadline. You'll need to replace the certificates".
- Thus it's true that the agencies are still in the deliberation phase. It's the national design studio that is prototyping.
Terr_ 1 days ago [-]
Computer + Legal sleuthing together, I approve.
The piece documents a variety of related illegalities, but to cobble together an excerpt around the one in the title:
> After Florida 2000, Congress passed a law [...] that voter registration cannot live inside the White House of any sitting president. [...] today vote.gov is registered to the Election Assistance Commission. [...] But in the certificate logs [...] was a working preview of vote.gov [...] dated April 10. DOJ told a federal court the infrastructure does not exist. Both of those cannot be true. Either DOJ lied to a federal judge, or the studio is building a replacement for the country’s voter registration site without telling the agencies whose work it would replace. There is no third option.
Oof. I really don't like the idea of making all regular government access gated through the office of one dude who claims his position (at least, only when he's in it) is literally above consequences for breaking the law.
Imagine the abuses of the No Fly List, but orders of magnitude worse. Publish a negative article about the regime, whoops, now somehow you can't log into any government site anymore, how strange, how sad.
> When the federal government collects information about citizens, the law requires specific things first. Privacy disclosures. Notices in the Federal Register. Published contracts with outside vendors. I went looking for all of it across twelve National Design Studio programs and found none of it, not a single required document filed across any of the twelve. Every missing document is, by itself, a violation of federal law, and these are the laws Congress wrote after Watergate to make sure the federal government could not run secret surveillance programs on its own citizens.
So this leads us to the classic "malice or incompetence" question... I want to nip that in the bud. Over the past few years we've seen that there is a kind of pathological input which gives the algorithm unbounded runtime. If you can't decide quickly, then the correct answer is both, unless and until the miscreant wants to plead one or the other.
> The National Design Studio was created by executive order in August 2025. [...] Its leader is Joe Gebbia, cofounder of Airbnb
This is, incidentally, a Ycombinator company, which I think adds adds a little bonus HN relevance.
P.S.: I don't understand why the submitter's comment is [dead].
throwway120385 22 hours ago [-]
> This is, incidentally, a Ycombinator company, which I think adds adds a little bonus HN relevance.
Almost like VC-funded tech companies became incubators for this kind of "we alone should be responsible for all of this" kind of thinking.
Cringlo 23 hours ago [-]
This is frightening and will almost certainly be memory-holed pretty quickly on this website. Those allied with the coming panopticon state have too much power on this site to let conversation about this continue un-abetted
asdff 23 hours ago [-]
91 points in 3 hours but nowhere to be found on hn anymore.
Jtsummers 23 hours ago [-]
> 91 points in 3 hours but nowhere to be found on hn anymore.
It's on the second page (#37 or so at the time of your comment), it's not that hidden.
No discussion, and this is a discussion forum. It's not surprising that it steadily dropped like that.
asdff 2 hours ago [-]
Should have worked AI into the title
Sabinus 19 hours ago [-]
If the Obama or Biden admin was doing this, the Republican right would have had an apocalyptic reaction.
The President making moves to take control of presidential elections via 'radical legal reinterpretations' and executive orders would have been the culmination of every fear about the government. If there is voter fraud, the office of the President should be able to prove that to other governmental organisations and have their oversight on voting reform and infrastructure. There is no justification for this to be done through the President's Office.
This is on top of a President who refuses to publicly acknowledge they lost an election and fires anyone who says otherwise?
The whole 'authoritarian/fascism is coming' thing is getting more and more real the longer the Trump admin goes on.
blks 9 hours ago [-]
And yet all these 2nd amendment guys are nowhere to be seen fighting the dictatorship, as they sometimes claim wanting to use their guns for.
snvzz 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Sabinus 18 hours ago [-]
Would you applaud the Trump White House having direct and unsupervised access to your prescriptions, your voter registration, your passport and biometrics, and every federal login?
And any hint of compliance with privacy, disclosure and oversight laws will come only after multiple years and multiple lawsuits, if ever.
JuniperMesos 13 hours ago [-]
Does the federal government not already have access to those things? I enter my phone number in at the pharmacy when I pick up my federally-controlled ADHD medication because the law demands I do so in order to prevent abuse of that medication. My passport and the associated biometrics are themselves a federal government document, the white house (regardless of who is president at any given time) is the entity that controls the bureaucracy I gave my biometrics to in order to get the passport. Same with the federal websites I log in into.
Voter registration is a state, rather than a federal, concern under the present constitutional order (barring the various federal civil rights laws and federal court decisions based on them that regulate how states can do voter registration). But I don't particularly care if the government that knows the details of my voter registration is the one governing 40 million people in California, or 330 million people in the whole united states - both are equally faceless gigantic bureaucracies to me.
Indeed, I think it would be reasonable for voting to be a federal rather than a state responsibility, precisely because in modern US elections every voter has an interest in the proper voting and registration procedures being followed for all voters in the US, including those in other states. It would probably require a constitutional amendment to fully realize this goal, but certainly we've amended the constitution before.
Terr_ 39 minutes ago [-]
> Does the federal government not already have access to those things?
The president is not the government, the properties of the whole are not the properties of a part. We do not want a system where they have direct un-audited and law-ignoring access to all those things.
_____
The nearby school has temporary custody of your child for most workdays, and can direct the child to be in certain rooms or watch certain videos.
Now the new Principal claims they have the authority to direct your child to their house during recess, to watch "educational videos" in their bedroom.
Your childless neighbor says "No big deal, the school could already do that anyway and he's already in charge."
Do you agree with that neighbor, or is something very wrong with how they're approaching the issue?
Note the sketchiness of https://passports.gov as it exists today in particular.
My personal take is that the administration has had no problems taking over digital/physical infrastructure in undemocratic and authoritarian ways. And, the fact that this "design studio" is creating staging sites for some of the most sensitive government services like voter information and passports is ominous even when we don't know exactly what the contents are of their redesigns. If you take a straight reading of the executive order there are 1,000 other websites that they could start their work on that are far far worse to use than https://vote.gov and https://usa.gov/passport.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/impr...
Does the following story make sense?
- The agencies will take ninety days just to approve the "voter list creation committee"
- The plan is for the DOGE-equivalent to create example sites from AirBnB templates so that when the deadline approaches they can say "Here, adopt this code so you can make the deadline. You'll need to replace the certificates".
- Thus it's true that the agencies are still in the deliberation phase. It's the national design studio that is prototyping.
The piece documents a variety of related illegalities, but to cobble together an excerpt around the one in the title:
> After Florida 2000, Congress passed a law [...] that voter registration cannot live inside the White House of any sitting president. [...] today vote.gov is registered to the Election Assistance Commission. [...] But in the certificate logs [...] was a working preview of vote.gov [...] dated April 10. DOJ told a federal court the infrastructure does not exist. Both of those cannot be true. Either DOJ lied to a federal judge, or the studio is building a replacement for the country’s voter registration site without telling the agencies whose work it would replace. There is no third option.
Oof. I really don't like the idea of making all regular government access gated through the office of one dude who claims his position (at least, only when he's in it) is literally above consequences for breaking the law.
Imagine the abuses of the No Fly List, but orders of magnitude worse. Publish a negative article about the regime, whoops, now somehow you can't log into any government site anymore, how strange, how sad.
> When the federal government collects information about citizens, the law requires specific things first. Privacy disclosures. Notices in the Federal Register. Published contracts with outside vendors. I went looking for all of it across twelve National Design Studio programs and found none of it, not a single required document filed across any of the twelve. Every missing document is, by itself, a violation of federal law, and these are the laws Congress wrote after Watergate to make sure the federal government could not run secret surveillance programs on its own citizens.
So this leads us to the classic "malice or incompetence" question... I want to nip that in the bud. Over the past few years we've seen that there is a kind of pathological input which gives the algorithm unbounded runtime. If you can't decide quickly, then the correct answer is both, unless and until the miscreant wants to plead one or the other.
> The National Design Studio was created by executive order in August 2025. [...] Its leader is Joe Gebbia, cofounder of Airbnb
This is, incidentally, a Ycombinator company, which I think adds adds a little bonus HN relevance.
P.S.: I don't understand why the submitter's comment is [dead].
Almost like VC-funded tech companies became incubators for this kind of "we alone should be responsible for all of this" kind of thinking.
It's on the second page (#37 or so at the time of your comment), it's not that hidden.
The President making moves to take control of presidential elections via 'radical legal reinterpretations' and executive orders would have been the culmination of every fear about the government. If there is voter fraud, the office of the President should be able to prove that to other governmental organisations and have their oversight on voting reform and infrastructure. There is no justification for this to be done through the President's Office.
This is on top of a President who refuses to publicly acknowledge they lost an election and fires anyone who says otherwise?
The whole 'authoritarian/fascism is coming' thing is getting more and more real the longer the Trump admin goes on.
And any hint of compliance with privacy, disclosure and oversight laws will come only after multiple years and multiple lawsuits, if ever.
Voter registration is a state, rather than a federal, concern under the present constitutional order (barring the various federal civil rights laws and federal court decisions based on them that regulate how states can do voter registration). But I don't particularly care if the government that knows the details of my voter registration is the one governing 40 million people in California, or 330 million people in the whole united states - both are equally faceless gigantic bureaucracies to me.
Indeed, I think it would be reasonable for voting to be a federal rather than a state responsibility, precisely because in modern US elections every voter has an interest in the proper voting and registration procedures being followed for all voters in the US, including those in other states. It would probably require a constitutional amendment to fully realize this goal, but certainly we've amended the constitution before.
The president is not the government, the properties of the whole are not the properties of a part. We do not want a system where they have direct un-audited and law-ignoring access to all those things.
_____
The nearby school has temporary custody of your child for most workdays, and can direct the child to be in certain rooms or watch certain videos.
Now the new Principal claims they have the authority to direct your child to their house during recess, to watch "educational videos" in their bedroom.
Your childless neighbor says "No big deal, the school could already do that anyway and he's already in charge."
Do you agree with that neighbor, or is something very wrong with how they're approaching the issue?