Analysis of the underlying source code for four of the websites written by the secretive National Design Studio (NDS)
found that on at least two of them,
the studio installed a commercial tool called PostHog
that closely tracks what every visitor does on the site.

Another tool, apparently made in-house, sends user data to a destination that is not visible on the public internet.

The NDS apparently removed this tracking software after the Guardian reached out to the White House with a detailed series of questions on the NDS’s operations on 4 June.

On 17 June, White House spokesperson Liz Huston responded:

“All National Design Studio personnel comply with all legal requirements in their important work to improve how citizens interact with their government.”

The studio has also built versions of services legally assigned to other agencies,
including a passports website,
and a copy of
💥Login.gov,
the gateway more than 150 million Americans use to sign in to federal services,
-- the latter reportedly being overseen by a former Doge engineer who moved to the studio.

The NDS has also apparently built a copy of
💥vote.gov,
the federal voter-registration site that by law belongs to an independent bipartisan commission
inside a website site only accessible with a White House login.

🔥A federal voter-registration system run from inside the White House,
with identity and citizenship checks routed through systems the administration controls,
could let an incumbent see who is registering,
or check their registration, in the weeks before an election.

Public ownership records maintained by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa)
list the executive office of the president as the registrant of the studio’s sites,
including passports.gov and the vote.gov copy,
👉meaning that the office controls the domains.

Questions remain about the sort of access that this could give the White House to voter registration data.

John Davisson, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC),
said the studio’s approach risked creating a second version
“a whole sort of second skunk-works version of the federal government
with all these shady tracking technologies
and outside of the parameters of normal federal privacy laws”.

A skunk works is a figurative term for an experimental department within a larger organization with freedom to operate outside normal procedure.

The Guardian sent a detailed list of questions about the NDS to the White House Press Office for the attention of Gebbia and the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles,
who has oversight of the studio.

Separately, the Guardian sent a request to Gebbia’s presumed email at the NDS
(no addresses are publicly listed).
There was no response.

#posthog
#JoeGebbia #nds #doge #tracking #surveillance

The use of commercial tools on the sites departs from federal web-team conventions.

Davisson, the senior counsel at the EPIC, described the studio’s work as
“trying to establish their own sort of fly-by-night version of what federal agencies normally do with added tracking technologies
and less oversight”.

This is most apparent in the NDS’s employment of user tracking prior to outreach from the Guardian,
such that when a member of the public visited one of the studio’s federal websites,
a commercial tool called PostHog recorded what they did on the page.

PostHog’s session-recording feature,
which can replay every click, scroll and keystroke of a visitor’s time on a webpage,
is installed in the code of all four sites and enabled on two of them.

On the remaining two, the recording is held inactive only by a single setting inside PostHog’s dashboard,
which can be changed by whoever controls the website at any time.

The Guardian emailed PostHog for comment on its apparent provision of tracking tools to the NDS, but received no response.

Adblockers and similar privacy tools are used by millions of people to limit what third parties can learn about them as they browse.
Most of them work by intercepting requests that a visitor’s browser makes to known tracking services
– and blocking them before any data leaves the device.

Website source code shows that PostHog has been configured on
NDS-run sites to route analytics requests through an address on the federal website itself,
rather than through PostHog’s own servers.

Because the request appears to go to the site the user is already visiting, rather than to a recognisable third-party address, adblockers don’t flag it.

As PostHog explains in its own documentation,
this works “because ad blockers haven’t visited your domain to catalog your setup.
They don’t know what to block.”

In other words, the technique is specifically designed to evade privacy tools
– by presenting commercial tracking as ordinary website activity.

Serge Egelman, research director of the Usable Security and Privacy Group at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), explained:

“The issue there is that over the last several years,
due to abuses relating to this type of data collection,
there’s basically an arms race with tools being released to allow consumers to try and exert some control over what data gets collected.”

Egelman said that he had not looked specifically at the PostHog tool or its deployment on federal websites,
but he did point to a lawsuit involving the addition of commercial tracking technology to a state government website.

“I testified on Meta where the [Meta] Pixel was put on the California DMV website.

And Meta was able to obtain information about when people are requesting, say, disability placards,
reinstating a suspended license, things like that
– sensitive information that’s actually protected by federal law.”

He added: “It’s not like someone going to the DMV website expects a private company to receive their personal data and then be allowed to use that however they want.”

PostHog comes with a separate feature called session recording,
which plays back every click, scroll and keystroke a visitor makes,
like a video recording of their entire visit.

Princeton University researchers who first documented the technology in 2017 wrote that watching such a recording was “as if someone is looking over your shoulder”.

On the Trump Accounts and TrumpRX websites, the feature has been built into the page code and is held inactive only by a single setting inside PostHog’s dashboard.

The NDS can turn it on at any time, on either site, without making changes in the underlying website code.

Separately, until the Guardian sought comment on this reporting, the NDS’s own website, ndstudio.gov,
ran a 539-line piece of bespoke code that recorded visitors’ clicks, form entries and navigation;

assigned each visitor a session identifier;

and forwarded the captured data to an address that does not appear anywhere on the public internet.

The script’s source code refers to it as AutoMonitor.

#posthog #JoeGebbia #nds #doge #tracking #surveillance

A 2002 federal law,
the E-Government Act,
requires any federal agency that collects personal information through a website to first publish a written privacy impact assessment
explaining what it collects and where the information goes.

The Privacy Act of 1974 requires a separate, parallel public notice,
a “system of records notice”,
describing the records the agency keeps.

A 2010 office of management and budget memorandum extended both requirements to federal agencies’ use of commercial
web-tracking tools, including the kind that PostHog provides.

The Guardian could find no such filings for the studio’s web-tracking layer.

None of the four sites carry a privacy impact assessment naming PostHog or describing the IP addresses and on-site activity the tool collects.

None of the four are covered by a system of records notice that addresses what is collected or where it goes.

The one published privacy instrument that relates to any of the four programmes,
a treasury notice for the Trump Accounts programme,
describes how the children’s-investment programme is administered
but does not name PostHog and does not describe the tracking on trumpaccounts.gov at all.

Davisson, the EPIC attorney,
called the studio’s failure to publish such a notice
“a pretty clearcut violation of section 208” of the E-Government Act,

adding: “There’s just no suggestion that they’re trying to comply in good faith with any of their obligations when it comes to the collection of personal information.”

It’s not known what data was collected from users of the government websites while the tools were live,
whether it was retained
and who has custody of the data.

#posthog #JoeGebbia #nds #doge #tracking #surveillance

Some of the NDS’s work is even more opaque,
including an apparent redesign of the federal government’s voting registration hub.

A sign-in page run by the studio on a White House-controlled web address carries the title
“Log in to vote.gov preview”.

Above the password field is a notice: “For official use only. Actions will be recorded in accordance with applicable law.”

Vote.gov is a federal voter registration website.

By law it belongs to the Election Assistance Commission (EAC),
an independent, bipartisan body that Congress established in 2002 after the disputed 2000 election.

Congress created the commission specifically so no sitting president would control the federal voter-registration system.

The studio’s version has been live on White House systems since
17 September 2025, according to public records of secure web addresses.

Late last year, the NDS began presenting its system to state election directors.

The first such briefing, on 17 October, was on a call of the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED).

Call notes summarising the meeting record members representing states of both parties expressing
“serious concerns with this project not complying with state law”
and noting that
“the developers do not seem to want to spend the time to understand election official concerns”.

Brianna Schletz,
the Election Assistance Commission’s executive director,
reportedly told state directors on the same call that the conversations were “informal”,
and that commissioners would later vote on whether to stay involved.

No record of any such vote has since appeared in the commission’s public proceedings.

Asked for comment by the Guardian,
a NASED spokesperson, Amy Cohen,
confirmed by email that
“NASED held a call in October joined by representatives from the National Design Studio and members of the EAC leadership team”.

Cohen added:
“NASED does not have a position on this project.

NASED has had no further communication with the National Design Studio on this or any other project;

both NASED as an organization and our members in their individual capacities engage with the EAC regularly about a variety of different topics and projects.”

Six days after the
17 October meeting,
on 23 October,
a National Design Studio engineer, Akash Bobba,
reportedly briefed the system on a recorded conference call organised by the
National Association of Secretaries of State.

Under the studio’s design, voters would be required to verify their identity through Login.gov,
the federal sign-in gateway,
and to have their citizenship checked against a database run by the Department of Homeland Security.

Asked on the call what the federal government would retain of the personal information voters entered into the system,
Bobba reportedly said that
“clear data retention policies” would be given to states ahead of implementation,
but conceded:
“I don’t know what they retain and what they are logging.”

The Election Assistance Commission has been part of the discussions.

Its chair, Donald Palmer, reportedly said the commission was
“facilitating discussion with state election officials on modernizing an accessible tool to provide a verifiable digital registration option”.

The Guardian contacted the Election Assistance Commission for comment but received no response.

The EPIC’s Davisson said:
“With vote.gov, that’s the province of the Election Assistance Commission.

But if you’re centralizing that in the White House, the White House is going to have sort of access to that backbone of data.

He added:
“Doing that outside of the appropriate channels,
I think, is definitely going to
– it’s dangerous
and it’s going to erode trust.”

The Help America Vote Act of 2002 put
voter-registration administration under an independent bipartisan commission,
structurally outside the reach of any sitting president.

The studio’s version appears to collapse this arm’s-length arrangement.

The Guardian has not seen what is on the other side of the sign-in,
but published Cisa records show who runs the system it lives on,
which is under White House control.

The commission Congress put in charge of vote.gov has not decided to formally participate in the initiative.

The build itself is on White House systems.

#posthog #AkashBobba #nds #doge #tracking #surveillance

The White House's National Design Studio has also built or taken control of websites that belong,
by law or by convention,
to other federal agencies.

The sites handle some of the most sensitive personal information Americans give to the government.

Passports.gov is now run from inside the White House,
not from the state department.

The state department operates US passport services through its existing site at travel.state.gov.

The studio’s version collects identity information from people applying for passports.

It carries no privacy notice.

Developer test code was left running on the live page.

In response to a request for comment,
a state department spokesperson wrote:

“The Department of State is working closely with the White House to deliver the best possible service for our passport customers
while safeguarding US national security.”

They added:
“US passport books and passport cards
– and the programs and websites that support them
– represent the gold standard in secure international travel documents,
underpinned by state-of-the-art security and technology.”

They referred additional questions to the White House.

Trumpaccounts.gov is the federal website for the children’s investment programme created in last summer’s tax legislation.

The treasury department, which administers the programme,
is the registrant of record for the site.

But the site itself runs through the same White House-controlled commercial account as the studio’s own sites:

ndstudio.gov,
the prescription-drug site trumprx.gov,
the food-policy site realfood.gov
and others.

The treasury department did not respond to a request for comment.

Login.gov is the federal sign-in gateway that more than 150 million Americans use to access services from social security to tax filing.

The studio’s preview of vote.gov,
described in the previous post,
uses Login.gov to verify the identities of visitors.

The Guardian contacted the General Services Administration (GSA), which operates Login.gov, for comment.

A spokesperson replied in an email:
“Login.gov is committed to the highest standards of privacy, transparency, and security.

Our Privacy Impact Assessment was most recently reviewed in March 2026.

All personnel supporting Login.gov,
including detailees,
are required to comply with applicable GSA policies, security requirements, privacy controls, and governance processes.”

The NDS, meanwhile, seems to be expanding its footprint across more government websites.

In late May, three new addresses tied to the NDS appeared in the public records:
chat.staging.ndstudio.gov,
onboarding.ndstudio.gov
and upload.ndstudio.gov.

#posthog #nds #doge #tracking #surveillance

theguardian.com/us-news/2026/j…