The Trump administration launched America.gov, an AI-powered chatbot designed to serve as a single entry point to federal services, on Tuesday. President Trump signed an executive order establishing the site during the launch event, calling it "a restoration of America's founding promise." The platform searches across roughly 29,000 government websites and returns answers drawn from official federal sources, according to the site's description.
In its current Phase 1 rollout, America.gov focuses on making it faster to locate government information. The chatbot operates in English, Spanish, or French, accepts voice input through a microphone icon, and offers step-by-step guidance on tasks like passport renewals. Users can upload PDFs of government forms or letters, and the site says personal information will be automatically stripped out. U.S. Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia told CNBC's "Squawk Box" that the platform is powered by Google's Gemini and Elon Musk's Grok. When Mashable asked the chatbot directly which language models it runs on, it replied: "I do not publish which language models power America." The site says it doesn't retain conversations, though some answers may be cached for up to two hours, and it doesn't require an account or save names or IP addresses.
Phase 2 is slated for 2027 and will let people apply, enroll, and track progress directly in the chat, according to the site's About page. Planned features include renewing passports, enrolling in Medicare, checking student-loan information, reserving federal campsites, and finding federal jobs. A mobile app is also on the roadmap. In testing on its first day, Mashable found the chatbot confirmed Joe Biden won the 2020 election and that Trump's name appears in the Epstein files. The Associated Press noted that when Trump spoke at the launch event on Tuesday, the site was changing its answers; when asked again by the AP about the 2020 election, America replied that it couldn't answer "political questions." The chatbot declined to answer questions not directly related to federal government topics and refused to provide websites to access abortion drugs, stating it can't give legal advice.
America.gov is the flagship product of the National Design Studio, created by an executive order Trump signed on Aug. 21, 2025, to redesign how the public interacts with government online. The site itself is operated by the General Services Administration, the agency that handles much of the federal government's technology. Both organizations have deep ties to Elon Musk's controversial "Department of Government Efficiency," which was quietly dissolved in May after Musk departed the executive office during a feud with Trump. The GSA was one of DOGE's earliest and hardest-hit targets, dismissing more than 1,000 employees and setting a goal of cutting staff by 63 percent in its Public Buildings Service division. NDS is led by Gebbia, the Airbnb cofounder and longtime Musk associate who joined DOGE in February 2025, and WIRED reported that NDS has become a landing pad for DOGE veterans. The Guardian found in June that sites already deployed by the team behind America.gov were using commercial tools to track user behavior and data, and those tools did not appear to comply with the Privacy Act. Whether Americans hand over personal information such as Social Security numbers and birth certificates to a chatbot built by DOGE alumni and powered in part by Musk's AI may depend on who they trust to run it. The platform's success will hinge on whether citizens view a government staffed by former efficiency crusaders as a credible steward of sensitive data, and whether the administration can resist the temptation to adjust politically inconvenient answers.