National Design Studio

And at worst, it's taking six different identifications from you, averaging them, and then letting a database run an algorithm to decide if you algorithmically seem like you might be a criminal.

Now circling back to Hogan and, well, National Design Studio, remember the email that he sent out where he said that the National Design Studio was not building a replacement login.gov? And yet here we are five weeks later, I'm looking at this database, and I'm seeing that in fact, Ty Groot, who is an engineer for National Design Studio, is in fact writing code to redesign and take over login.gov.

In fact, a switch went live on code that says NDS look and feel, and it describes a version of login.gov that gets served to you, but looks just like login.gov.

If I look and feel like NDS, I feel deceived and I look like an idiot, then yeah, I guess it is the look and feel of NDS.

And you know, I've been deep in this code for the past few weeks, just trying to understand it and trying to piece together this picture of what's happening and what's being built underneath us as we speak.

And there's an interesting series of events in this timeline that I think is worth pointing out because on August 24th, I filed five Freedom of Information Act requests with the GSA saying like what switches are turned on, who turned them on, which agencies are authorized to use them, and how many people have been run through them, that kind of thing.

And then the very next day, Edward Kornstein, you know, big balls from Doge, who also works with the National Design Studio, posted on X, login.gov, the auth service for the public, is getting a redesign.

The day after that, on the 26th, the GSA granted three of my requests for expedited processing of my FOIAs, which is the agency formally agreeing that my request is urgent, which, good news.

Uh, what is the name? He's the chief design officer, but there's a...

Here it is, the, uh, National Design Studio.

There.

The National Design Studio.

They make all the new websites.

So if you look up the food pyramid, they made the website for the food pyramid.

And that is a massive win for this administration.

I love it.

The public tip line that the FBI gave people that day lived on FBI infrastructure, and the FBI website called it Utah Valley Shooting instead of Kirk Tipline.

And this website belonged to the National Design Studio, which is a White House office that was created a mere three weeks earlier to redesign federal government digital services.

Now, I originally found this FBI Kirk Tipline back in May when I was investigating the protected network of government websites being built under National Design Studio.

And while at the time of my original investigation, there weren't a lot of websites that were up and running, their names were exposed through public certificate records, but their applications were locked behind the Cloudflare access gate.

So I had enough information to know that they exist without being able to really access what they were doing.

And the next day, Reuters reported that the administration was weighing whether to share state voter rolls with Homeland Security Investigations for criminal cases.

I can tell you one thing, if they're saying it out loud, then they probably already done it.

And one month later, state election officials got briefed on a federal voter registration system in the works through none other than the National Design Studio, one where applicants would have to verify their identity through a little-known system called login.gov while DHS's safe system checked citizenship.

Of course, you know, you know whose site you're on by just being there.

In plain, bold text, sitting directly above the privacy policy, it said, "Designed and engineered in DC by National Design Studio." So that's interesting, right? Different.

So she says, "I clicked through," and you should too.

The, or maybe you should just steer clear of it entirely.

Let's find out.

The National Design Studio Totally different, separate.

What the hell are they doing taking credit for the design of this ugly site anyway? Created by executive order in August of 2025, its job officially is to redesign how Americans experience their government, at least online anyway.

Its leader is Joe Gebbia.

Think of it as a transparency site.

We're not trying to be lower than everybody else, we just want the site that Joe Gebbia and Ed Horenstein have done a great job building this out with the National Design Studio.

It's elegant, easy to use, very fast, very accurate.

But we have been pristine in the way we've gotten the site out there so folks can actually figure out which pharmacies have what prices.