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White House design office installs visitor-tracking on federal websites

newsJun 28, 2026531,123

The Guardian found that the White House’s National Design Studio rebuilt and now operates copies of several federal websites and installed commercial visitor-tracking software, PostHog, on those sites. The studio, created by an executive order last August and staffed largely by veterans of Elon Musk’s “DOGE” team, rebuilt portals tied to passports, voter registration, prescription drug information and other services and hosts domains such as ndstudio.gov and copies of vote.gov and passports.gov. The tracking was configured in ways that can evade common browser privacy tools and the sites do not carry public privacy filings that federal law normally requires under the Privacy Act of 1974 and the E-Government Act of 2002. Because these sites route sensitive interactions through infrastructure the White House controls, the Guardian and privacy advocates say those arrangements place personally identifying and transaction data outside the reporting and accountability systems that usually cover federal agencies. The reporting has prompted calls for scrutiny of who can access collected data and whether the studio’s work complies with federal privacy and oversight rules, and it increases pressure on Congress, federal privacy offices and watchdogs to demand disclosures and audits.

Alt National Park Service
@altnps.bsky.social

This post is going to be long but it’s important. One of the least-discussed developments in the Trump administration is the creation of the National Design Studio (NDS). On the surface, it was presented as a project to modernize government websites and improve the user experience.

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