Who holds authority at the National Design Studio.
The White House has published no roster or staff directory for the Studio. This page is built from named reporting, court records, the executive order, and public .gov registry data. We include people who hold documented decision-making authority or are tied to a specific finding on this site. We are not publishing a staff directory.
Our standard for naming someone
A person appears on this page only if at least one of these is true.
They hold a named leadership or decision-making role established by the executive order or confirmed by the White House.
They have been named in reporting or court filings in connection with a specific documented action.
They are listed in a public federal record as the responsible contact for a system or domain.
The people who decide what gets built
Four entries. Three named individuals and one body whose membership has never been published.
Joe Gebbia
Airbnb co-founder, Tesla board member, appointed the first U.S. Chief Design Officer on the day EO 14338 was signed. He entered government earlier in 2025 to work on the Office of Personnel Management's paper-based retirement systems, spent roughly six months at DOGE, then pitched a separate design office. The role required no Senate confirmation and carries no financial disclosure obligation. He reports to the White House Chief of Staff.
The private Cloudflare account gating the Studio’s preview sites is named “loveisaskill,” a phrase Gebbia has used publicly to describe his design philosophy. That naming is the thread connecting the domains to him personally.
Susie Wiles
EO 14338 places the Studio’s Administrator under the Office of the White House Chief of Staff. Wiles is named here because the reporting line is the structural fact this whole site turns on, not because of any action attributed to her.
A technology office building citizen-facing federal websites would ordinarily answer to GSA or to the agencies whose services it is rebuilding. This one answers to the President’s gatekeeper, which is what removes it from inspector general jurisdiction and agency privacy review.
Greg Hogan
When a federal court blocked DOGE personnel from accessing OPM personnel records, three people were granted exceptions. Hogan was one of them; the administration argued he was essential to ongoing system work. He now runs Login.gov, the federal government’s shared sign-in service, which holds accounts for more than 150 million people and performs biometric identity verification. We have found no public evidence that Hogan held a DOGE role, and he carries no DOGE tag here. The significant fact about Hogan is the access he holds now.
An advisory council with no published membership
Gebbia referenced a National Design Studio “advisory council” on a podcast and named Scott Belsky as its chair. Asked for more information, the Studio did not provide any. We have found no published membership list, charter, meeting notices, or minutes.
Federal advisory committees that include members from outside government are generally expected to be chartered and publicly noticed under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, with meetings open and records available. Whether that applies here depends on the council’s composition and function, neither of which is public. Belsky is named because he was identified publicly by the Studio’s own director, not because we have any finding about him.
People documented in reporting or filings
Each entry is tied to a specific documented action. Where a claim is an allegation rather than a finding, it is written as one.
Edward Coristine
FORMER DOGEOne of the most heavily documented DOGE engineers, Coristine was 19 during the events described here. In August 2025, the Social Security Administration’s chief data officer, Charles Borges, filed a whistleblower disclosure alleging that DOGE personnel uploaded a live copy of NUMIDENT, the file of every Social Security number ever issued, to a cloud environment without verified security controls. Borges warned that the exposure could, in a worst-case scenario, require reissuing Social Security numbers.
The Senate Homeland Security Committee minority report states that authorization to upload the data was apparently granted by Michael Russo and Aram Moghaddassi. Coristine is named in the complaint among DOGE personnel with access to the environment. The New York Times reported that he would have been given access to the server. We have seen no document establishing that he performed the upload, and we do not say he did. Borges left the agency shortly after filing.
The Senate report also states that Coristine had previously been dismissed from a job for sharing sensitive data with competitors. Photos and video on the Studio’s own site appear to show him as current staff.
Coristine did not respond to press requests for comment at the time of the whistleblower reporting.
Kaitlyn Koller
FORMER DOGEA former Senate Foreign Relations Committee aide who moved to DOGE and then into the Studio. Wired identified her as a DOGE operative and reported her move, while her own LinkedIn lists the Director of Operations title. She is among the more senior operational figures in the office.
No specific action is attributed to Koller here. She appears because the role is senior and the DOGE-to-Studio path is documented, not because of a finding against her.
Akash Bobba
FORMER DOGEOne of the original DOGE engineers. Public CISA .gov registry data lists him as the official cybersecurity contact for the U.S. African Development Foundation, a small independent agency the administration attempted to dissolve by executive order. The dissolution was blocked in court, but most staff were cleared out, leaving the credentials for a functioning federal domain in the hands of someone outside the agency’s remaining structure.
He has reportedly since left government, which raises rather than settles the question of who holds those credentials now. We have not established who currently controls the domain record.
Stephen Miller
Miller appears on this page for one reason: he has been reported as a principal architect of the administration’s election policy, including the citizenship-verification push that the voter-list executive order implements. That order is the policy context for the vote.gov preview appearing on White House infrastructure. We have found no document connecting Miller to the National Design Studio, and we are not asserting one. Treat this as adjacent policy context, not as a link in a chain.
Thirteen people we identified and chose not to name
After the initial DOGE-linked hires, the Studio recruited openly from the private sector. None has a documented DOGE role, none holds decision-making authority we can establish, and none has a finding attached to them.
NOT LISTED
Why we don’t name them. We identified these people through LinkedIn, NextGov/FCW and NOTUS reporting, the Studio’s own blog bylines, and White House confirmations of individual hires. Publishing a searchable list of junior employees would expose private individuals to harassment without telling you anything the count does not.
What the second wave tells us. It cuts against the simplest version of the story. If the Studio were simply DOGE with a new logo, it would not be openly recruiting accessibility specialists, engineers, and creative directors. What the evidence supports is a real design organization built around a leadership layer with documented ties to DOGE and kept DOGE’s access. That is a narrower claim than “DOGE never ended,” and it is the one the evidence supports.
The Studio was built to DOGE’s blueprint
This is not just a rhetorical comparison. The two offices use the same temporary hiring authority, sit inside the Executive Office of the President, and report through the White House. Compare either with an ordinary federal technology office and the structural similarities are hard to miss.
The right-hand column matters because of where the Studio was placed. Put the same office inside GSA and the rules around records, oversight, procurement, and privacy would look very different. That is the argument in one table.
“Contested” is doing real work in the FOIA row. No court has ruled on the Studio’s status. Offices inside the Executive Office of the President can fall outside FOIA when their sole function is to advise and assist the President. The question is whether the Studio only advises or actually exercises independent authority. Our reasoning is on the Evidence page.
Why an unpaid appointment discloses less than a paid one
A reasonable question about an office run by a billionaire who takes no salary is what the arrangement is for. We are not going to guess at anyone’s motives, and we would need a document before we did. But the mechanics are public, and they are counterintuitive.
Some White House advisers serve as Special Government Employees, an advisory designation limited to 130 days of service in a year. SGEs may be paid or unpaid. Those drawing a salary above a certain grade must file a public financial disclosure. Unpaid ones generally do not. SGEs may also continue drawing outside income while serving and, in some circumstances, are not required to disclose conflicts.
So the disclosure picture runs backwards from intuition. A paid senior official files an OGE Form 278 that the public can request. An unpaid one may file nothing public at all. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has flagged this specific gap, noting that it is difficult to know the extent of these individuals’ financial conflicts precisely because the disclosures do not exist.
The separate disclosure route is the annual report on White House staff, which Public Law 103-270 requires to be transmitted to Congress, listing titles, classifications, and salaries. Staff who draw no salary through the White House Office appear on it differently or not at all, and the report lists positions without describing what anyone works on.
What this means for the Studio specifically. Joe Gebbia took the role without Senate confirmation and, per reporting, without filing a financial disclosure. He remains on the boards of Airbnb and Tesla, holds a minority stake in the San Antonio Spurs, and co-founded the housing startup Samara. We are not aware of any Studio project touching those interests. We also cannot rule it out because the document that would let anyone check does not exist.
Unpaid is not just a gesture. It can change what the public gets to see.
Serving without salary can change which financial disclosure requirements apply and whether a filing is public or confidential. That is a fact about how the rules operate, not a claim about anyone’s reasons for serving unpaid.
The precedent worth knowing
Musk also served without salary during his time with DOGE, while maintaining extensive private business interests. The Washington Post reported that his companies had received more than $38 billion in government funding over two decades. Other DOGE personnel served as Special Government Employees while continuing outside work. None of that establishes anything about the National Design Studio. It does show why the distinction between public and confidential financial disclosure matters when private-sector figures enter government temporarily.