White House design studio delays update to US web standards

In short: The National Design Studio, created to redesign thousands of US government websites with help from AI, is behind schedule and has paused work on updating shared web standards.

What happened

President Donald Trump created the National Design Studio (NDS) in August 2025 to overhaul about 27,000 .gov websites in three years. The goal was to make government sites more consistent, easier to use, and quicker to update, with heavy use of AI (software that can generate text, images, and code).

About a year later, Ars Technica reports that NDS has launched only a few dozen sites, and many are single pages that mostly collect sign-ups. Some newly registered domains, like live.gov and why.gov, simply redirect visitors to older sites. Ars also notes unusual cases like 250.gov redirecting to a .org address, which is uncommon for a government site.

The plan also relied on updating the US Web Design System (USWDS), a set of shared building blocks meant to keep government websites accessible and mobile-friendly. But a public update tied to the USWDS project says the part of Trump’s order requiring those updates is “no longer a requirement,” at least for now. That leaves the overall “everyone uses the same playbook” goal in limbo.

Why it matters

Government websites are how people apply for services, find benefits, and get official information. If redesigns are rushed, inconsistent, or hard to use, it can feel like trying to fill out important forms on a messy desk, where every office uses a different layout. Reports also raised concerns about accessibility (whether people with disabilities can use a site) and, separately, about visitor tracking on some NDS-built sites.

Source: Arstechnica