If you want accurate information about life-changing government services, a potentially hallucinating chatbot might not be your first choice. However, the Trump administration is rolling out a new digital portal for access to federal government tasks that puts AI front and center, even though there are concerns that existing federal digital services may be in danger.
Trump announced the launch of America.gov in an executive order on Tuesday, describing the new site as a “unified digital front door to the Federal Government for every individual in the US seeking Federal information or services.”
As to what that front door will look like, the key thing to pay attention to in the EO is that the site is a place to “communicate in plain language” and ostensibly “receive accurate answers,” and we all know what that means: It’s an AI chatbot.
Google confirmed as much in its own announcement that it was a technology partner in the America.gov initiative, "leveraging Gemini to help more than 100 million people access critical public resources with greater speed and ease.” A White House spokesperson told that xAI’s Grok is the other tech partner on the initiative, so watch out for vulgar responses when you ask a simple question.
“Advances in technology now make possible a fundamentally different relationship between the people and the Federal Government,” Trump’s EO read in part. It says individuals will be able to “where authorized and technically available, complete Government transactions without being required to navigate the websites of multiple agencies.”
Navigate to the site right now and you’re met with a messy site that the National Design Studio, which claims responsibility for its layout, ought to be ashamed of. A paragraph summarizing the purpose of the site is interspersed with graphics that serve no purpose and only interfere with the flow of the text, including one mimicking the fingerprint icon from iOS that actually overlaps with the words before and after it.
Scroll down to see some of the tasks that the site claims it will be able to handle, like comparing medication costs, updating your legal name across multiple agencies, or submitting a passport application, and clicking on every single one of them only shows that the feature is coming sometime in 2027.
The White House tells us that the embedded chatbots can provide complete answers culled from the 29,000 government websites that were ingested for the platform, but all those additional features will be coming over time.
What you have now on America.gov, then, is just a federal government chatbot powered by Gemini and Grok that refers users to other websites - helpful, but not exactly the central portal Trump promised in his EO. The Office of Management and Budget has 90 days to tell agencies how they're supposed to implement their integration with America.gov, meaning it could be a while before the site is as useful as the administration promises, if it ever is at all.
In the meantime, it gives Google and xAI a rather high-profile proving ground for their chatbots, courtesy of the federal government. America.gov’s privacy policy claims that the project’s tech partners are operating under zero data retention agreements, so user prompts and responses aren’t retained, sold, turned into advertising profiles, or used to train their AIs.
The White House further asserted to us that no user messages are transmitted to Gemini or Grok, though the privacy policy also mentions that America.gov’s AI providers may be sent approximate area information to make results more relevant, which seems to contradict the White House’s claim.
Digital service reliability in doubt
The idea that the Trump administration would put access to the federal government behind AI chatbots isn’t surprising given how readily the White House has embraced AI since Trump returned to office.
A recent coup at the team overseeing the US Web Design System, which maintains design standards and provides components that help government websites from the federal all the way down to the local level meet accessibility requirements, has furthered the AI push as well.
As reported last week by FedScoop, the decade-old USWDS was recently purged of its leadership, putting a self-described AI engineer from the Treasury Department in charge of the system. The new USWDS chief, Ryan Parker, said that he plans to automate as much accessibility testing as possible across the system.
The state of the system has led a group of current and former government web design leaders and contributors to the open-source USWDS to sound the alarm in an open letter to the General Services Administration that, coincidentally or not, was published, again by FedScoop, not long before the America.gov announcement.
With the Trump administration seemingly set on placing as many government services as it can within reach of an AI chatbot that could make critical mistakes, open and accessible web services available elsewhere from the government remain essential. If the open letter's concerns prove well founded, those services could become less reliable, but hey - at least you’ll be able to chat to Grok about it on America.gov without any way to actually solve your problem until sometime in 2027. ®