Off The Hook - Wed, 08 Jul 2026 19:00:00 EST

I really, really, really, really, really don't want to talk about this guy anymore.

He just seems to inject himself into every damn story.

He's ruined the World Cup and now apparently .gov websites are also on the list.

Great story in Ars Technica.

I just would like to recommend people read the story entitled Trump's Plan to Redesign Every .gov Website Leads to AI-Designed Horrors.

Oh, boy.

It's as bad as you think it could possibly be.

Maybe even worse.

I'm just going to read the opening part.

Maybe we can discuss a little bit, but not a whole lot.

Trump's plan to fill the digital potholes and use AI to quickly redesign every government website isn't going very well.

I don't know if anybody's surprised by that.

Now, last August, he created the National Design Studio website.

or NDS, created it by executive order, a temporary Doge-like entity that answers only to the president.

NDS was tasked with creating new standards to update the U.S. web design system.

which we all know as USWDS.

That's a thing.

That really exists.

The plan was to overhaul 27,000 .gov websites in just three years.

At the end of this so-called America by Design initiative, the government's design language would supposedly be more usable and beautiful.

That is how they described it.

However...

However, that monumental task assigned to a small team under a short time frame was seemingly made harder by Doge's deep cuts to agencies previously responsible for improving government websites, including dismantling the 18F technology unit and restructuring the U.S. digital service into Doge.

Those teams knew exactly how hard it can be to get every government agency to adopt new web standards.

They had spent years trying to push agencies to update their sites to comply with the USWDS standards, yet only 30% of government websites used them as of mid-2023.