Donald Trump has developed perhaps the most effective way to get the general public to appreciate the work of public servants by launching a shitty chatbot meant to replace them. On Tuesday, the president signed an executive order to launch America.gov, an online portal that was built for “streamlining access to government services.”
It’s not a terrible idea…in theory. America.gov is designed to basically work with the same chatbot-style interface that has become the primary way people communicate with large language models, except this one is supposed to exclusively pull information from official government sources. It is designed to take the information scattered across more than 29,000 government websites and make it all accessible through a single site.
While the executive order was just signed, America.gov is live—the product of the National Design Studio, which Trump established via executive order last year, led by Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia. So if you want to ask how to renew your passport, or where to get specific tax documents, or whatever else you might need, you can try to get it from America.gov.
For what it’s worth, the site does seem like it works—and perhaps too well for Trump’s own liking. While some, like Aaron Fritschner, have pointed out that the Trump administration has clearly thought about some of the types of questions America.gov would be asked and preemptively neutered them to prevent anything that would reflect poorly on Trump being produced (America.gov is not eager to tell you the change in gas prices under Trump, for instance), they clearly couldn’t cover all their basis.
Helen Kennedy shared on Bluesky a series of posts showing America.gov repeatedly undermining the Trump party line, noting things like Trump’s presence in the Epstein files or stating that it’s illegal for the president to rename the Kennedy Center without congressional approval. Senator Adam Schiff called attention to the fact that America.gov recognizes that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, despite Trump’s insistence otherwise.
We’ll see how long those answers stick. At the time of publication, the chatbot feature was unavailable, so it’s possible it’s going back to the lab for further lobomization.
While the site is supposedly only designed to pull answers from government sources, it seems that it does respond to questions that would be outside of that scope. That’s likely because America.gov is reportedly running on frontier general-purpose models, namely Google’s Gemini and SpaceX’s Grok, according to Semafor reporter Ashley Gold.
The expectation from the Trump administration is that America.gov continues to grow as an information hub, and it will reportedly be able to complete forms and applications, like enrolling in Medicare, by 2027. Now, should we trust an administration that is actively cutting these services and actively demonizing people for applying for welfare? No, absolutely not. If you’re worrieda bout killer AI, maybe worry about the AI tool in the hands of an administration that is actively trying to prevent people from accessing services known to save lives.
