Power Grab/Fire anyone who can stop him
A White House design office ran commercial visitor-tracking software on four federal sites and built a login-gated copy of vote.gov
The Guardian reported on June 28, 2026 that the National Design Studio, staffed largely by DOGE veterans, did so without the privacy notices normally required. The White House said staff complied with all legal requirements.
What happened
On June 28, 2026, the Guardian reported that the National Design Studio ran PostHog, a commercial analytics tool capable of session recording, on four federal sites. The studio was created by executive order in August 2025 inside the Executive Office of the President. It is led by Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia and staffed largely by DOGE veterans.
The tracking was routed through the federal domains so privacy blockers would not catch it. It ran without the privacy notices the Privacy Act and E-Government Act normally require. The sites were ndstudio.gov, trumprx.gov, realfood.gov and trumpaccounts.gov.
Certificate records showed a “vote.gov preview” login page on White House infrastructure, live since September 17, 2025. By law vote.gov belongs to the independent Election Assistance Commission. The purpose of the duplicate site, what data it would collect and whether it was meant to replace the public vote.gov were not established.
Who benefited
The White House gained a channel to collect behavioral data on visitors to federal sites through an office outside normal agency privacy review. If a White House-built vote.gov went live, it would also control the public’s entry point to voter registration.
Who wanted something
Trump’s executive order created the National Design Studio and put Gebbia in charge of redesigning government websites. Its staff came from DOGE. The administration’s wider push to centralize federal data, including election data, in offices close to the White House supplied the context.
Who lost out
Members of the public who visited the four federal sites were tracked by commercial software routed to avoid their privacy settings. The Election Assistance Commission, an independent agency, had its site copied without public explanation. Prospective voters would lose if the official registration portal were replaced by one operated from the White House.
Why it matters
A political office in the White House ran tracking software on government sites and built its own version of the national voter-registration portal. That moves data collection about citizens from agencies bound by privacy law into the president’s own operation. The vote.gov copy was still unexplained when the Guardian reported it.
Sources The GuardianInternational Business Times UKBenton InstituteBoing BoingWikipedia