Joe Gebbia on america.gov: replacing 29,000 government websites with one AI-powered portal

america.gov: one portal to replace 29,000 government websites

Joe Gebbia left Airbnb to fix what he calls an embarrassment — the digital face of the United States government. As founder of the National Design Studio, he is consolidating 29,000 federal websites into a single AI-powered portal at america.gov, where citizens can search for information and, soon, act on it without leaving the site.

The project grew out of an earlier win. Eighteen months ago, Gebbia joined DOGE with a specific brief to modernize how federal employees retire, a process that was entirely paper-based. Recruiting ex-Airbnb engineers and designers, his team took it online in roughly six months, cutting the retirement process from six months to six seconds. That success surfaced the larger question: why not do this across every agency?

“There's now 29,000 government websites of all shapes and sizes. What if there was just one? What if there was just one website where people could go to search for the information that they need and also action it? Americans spend 10 billion with a B hours every year trying to get things done in the government. The whole point of america.gov is to end that.”

The 29,000-to-1 problem

The math on website-by-website modernization doesn't work. With 29,000 federal sites ranging from high-traffic destinations like the IRS to long-tail information pages, upgrading them individually would take longer than any administration. The answer, as Gebbia frames it, is to stop trying and build one destination instead.

America.gov's LLM is trained exclusively on official government sources. It doesn't scrape the internet, which Gebbia argues makes it accurate and current by construction. Because the portal sits inside the government, it can also connect directly to agency databases — something no third-party could do. That internal position is the core technical advantage.

Replacing clicks with actions

The Social Security card replacement flow is the sharpest illustration of the problem. Gebbia says replacing a lost card currently requires 87 clicks with no errors. On america.gov, logged-in users will do it in one. The same logic applies to changing a postal address, enrolling in Medicare, or signing up for armed service.

The primary success metric isn't page views or session length. Americans spend 10 billion hours a year navigating government processes, according to a published government figure Gebbia cites, and the portal's goal is to put a meaningful share of that time back into people's lives — and, as he suggests, into GDP.

Two phases

Phase one is information retrieval. Phase two, expected within months, is in-portal action: enrollment, applications, address changes, completed without bouncing to a separate agency site. The transactional layer is enabled by APIs Gebbia's team is connecting to directly, and for agencies that don't yet have them, an executive order mandates their creation.

Beyond federal government

Multiple states have already approached the team about replicating the model. Gebbia also says several countries reached out in the three days before this conversation, though he declines to name them. If the federal build holds, he expects it to set a new standard that states and foreign governments can follow.

Gebbia draws a direct line from Airbnb to this project: both required building trust across a system nobody fully controlled, at scale, with no clean starting point. The difference here is authority. At Airbnb, the founders called every shot. At the National Design Studio, it's the president's universe, and Gebbia is explicit that the political support from the top is what makes the project possible.