The National Design Studio builds digital infrastructure for the United States Government. We're a team of engineers, designers, and product leaders working to modernize how America serves its citizens.

250.gov is a site for America’s 250th anniversary, bringing together events across the country, a traveling museum called the Freedom Truck, historical content, and resources in one place. Like most websites, it started out organized around pages, navigation, and search, which means turning what you want into a series of clicks. We shifted away from that and treated AI as part of the interface itself, returning results you can act on directly instead of making you piece them together, and building the system so it works reliably in the real world.

National Design Studio is redefining accessibility in public technology—not as a compliance exercise, but as a core design responsibility. We start from the premise that if a system is confusing, it is inaccessible, no matter how many boxes it checks. Our work focuses on eliminating friction at the structural level: fewer steps, clearer language, tighter flows, and interfaces that respect the time, attention, and dignity of the people using them.

Two engineers walked into the government six months ago to drag federal retirements from an underground mine onto the Internet. They built retire.opm.gov and are poised to turn six-month waits into near-instant processing for hundreds of thousands of employees.