How a website redesign order ended up holding the voter file.
Read top to bottom and the sequence does the arguing. An office is created to make federal websites look better. Nine months later it owns the domains for voter registration and passports, a federal judge has found the related voter system unlawful, and the commissioners of the agency that owns vote.gov have been removed. Highlighted entries carry the most weight.
Before the studio
The rules that were already in place, and the offices that knew how to follow them.
The E-Government Act sets the disclosure requirement
Congress requires agencies to publish a Privacy Impact Assessment before launching any system that collects personal information from the public, and a System of Records Notice before maintaining records retrievable by name. These are the filings AltNDS searched for and did not find. They are the baseline the rest of this timeline is measured against.
Congress makes the Election Assistance Commission independent
Created after the 2000 Florida recount, the EAC is structured as a bipartisan independent commission, not an executive agency. It owns vote.gov and certifies voting systems. The separation is the point: a sitting president is not supposed to run the place where citizens register to vote.
GSA shuts down 18F
The General Services Administration eliminates 18F, its internal technology consultancy of roughly 90 people, after DOGE flags it as non-critical. 18F had built the IRS Direct File system and cloud.gov, working inside GSA's procurement and privacy review structure. Eighty former employees later filed a class appeal arguing the cuts were retaliation. The capability was gone; the demand for it was not.
Musk exits and DOGE staff scatter into agencies
Musk leaves in May. DOGE personnel remain on the White House payroll inside the Executive Office of the President, and several move into permanent roles at the agencies they had been auditing. Gebbia, who entered government to work on OPM's retirement systems, begins pitching a separate design office rather than continuing under DOGE.
Executive Order 14338 creates the National Design Studio
The order announces the America by Design initiative and establishes the Studio inside the White House Office, led by a Chief Design Officer and administered as a temporary organization under 5 U.S.C. § 3161, the same hiring authority DOGE used. The Administrator reports to the Office of the White House Chief of Staff, not to an agency head.
Two dates worth holding onto: agencies must produce initial results by July 4, 2026, and the Studio closes three years from signing.
Joe Gebbia named first Chief Design Officer
The Airbnb co-founder announces his appointment on X, describing a mandate to make federal services as satisfying to use as the Apple Store. He came from DOGE, sits on Tesla’s board, and took the role without Senate confirmation. The office sets a target of overhauling 27,000 federal websites.
The League of Women Voters sues over the citizenship database
The organization sues DHS over the Social Security number search function added to the SAVE system, arguing the change violates federal privacy law and that the database is inaccurate enough to flag citizens as noncitizens.
DHS and SSA file the privacy notice for a system already running
A Notice of Modified System of Records for the expanded SAVE program appears in the Federal Register, days after the first hearing in the lawsuit challenging it. The Privacy Act requires such a notice before a system of records operates, not after.
This is the clearest documented instance of the pattern this site tracks: build the system, file the paperwork only when a court forces the issue. A federal judge later held that this specific sequence was unlawful.
Former DOGE personnel move into the Studio
Wired reports that DOGE employees joined the Studio, including Kaitlyn Koller, a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee aide. Greg Hogan, former OPM Chief Information Officer, takes over Login.gov, the sign-in system holding accounts for more than 150 million people. When a federal court blocked DOGE staff from OPM personnel records, Hogan was one of three granted an exception.
Executive Order 14399 orders a federal citizenship-verified voter list
“Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections” directs DHS and the Social Security Administration to compile Confirmed Citizen Lists and transmit them to states before any federal election. Section 4(c) gives DHS until June 29, 2026 to establish the infrastructure.
The same order directs USPS to open rulemaking on ballot envelope identifiers within 60 days, with a final rule due in 120. Federal funds may be withheld from entities deemed non-compliant.
Twenty-three attorneys general sue
New York Attorney General Letitia James, joined by 22 other state attorneys general and the governor of Pennsylvania, file suit to block the order, arguing it shifts control of elections from the states and Congress to the executive. Separately, eight voter-education organizations led by the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts challenge Sections 2 and 3 in the District of Massachusetts.
A second vote.gov appears under White House control
A certificate is issued for a working preview of vote.gov inside the Studio's staging environment, behind its Cloudflare gate. The domain traces to the Executive Office of the President. The live vote.gov remains with the Election Assistance Commission.
Ten days after the order setting a June 29 deadline for citizenship-list infrastructure, a voter-facing federal site exists on White House infrastructure. Certificate Transparency logs are public and append-only, which is why this date is checkable by anyone.
A reported statement to a federal court
The Drey Dossier reports that the Justice Department told a federal court the named agencies had not begun preparations and remained in the deliberative phase. If accurate, that statement and the April 10 certificate describe incompatible states of the world.
Passports.gov and its photo upload subdomains go up
The first passports.gov certificate is issued May 5. Two photo upload subdomains appear within a single hour on May 26. The registrant is the Executive Office of the President. The State Department, which actually issues passports, does not appear in the record at all. The sign-in page carries no agency seal, no privacy notice, and an empty security contact field.
The Drey Dossier publishes the certificate-log findings
Independent researcher Audrey Henson traces roughly 40 federal-looking domains to a single private Cloudflare account named “loveisaskill,” using certificate logs, browser network inspection, and CISA registry data. The investigation documents the vote.gov preview, the passports.gov build, PostHog analytics across Studio sites, and a custom AutoMonitor script.
The Guardian asks the White House questions, and the tracking comes down
The Guardian sends the White House a detailed series of questions about the Studio's operations on June 4. Per its reporting, the Studio apparently removed the tracking software after that outreach. On June 17, spokesperson Liz Huston responds that all Studio personnel comply with all legal requirements.
Removing software after a reporter asks about it is not an admission of illegality, and we do not present it as one. It does establish that the tracking was there, and that someone inside the Studio judged it worth taking down once a newspaper started asking.
DHS approves the build
The Secretary of Homeland Security approves USCIS's plan to build the infrastructure for the Confirmed Citizen Lists, three weeks before the deadline in the order.
A federal judge finds the voter verification system unlawful
Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan of the District of Columbia rules in a 75-page decision that the expanded SAVE system violated the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act, and that the agencies lacked statutory authority to build it. She writes that the agencies were scrambling to comply with an executive order aimed at reshaping federal elections.
By then the expanded system had been used to check more than 67 million registered voters. It flagged thousands as potential noncitizens; subsequent review found many were citizens eligible to vote. DHS disabled bulk uploads and Social Security number searches. Days later a judge in Florida ordered those features restored for four states.
The DHS infrastructure deadline arrives
The date Section 4(c) of EO 14399 set for DHS to have the Confirmed Citizen List infrastructure established one week after a federal court held the underlying system unlawful.
The Studio's reporting deadline arrives with nothing published
EO 14338 required agency heads to produce initial results on their America by Design work by this date. Twenty-four days later we have found no public accounting from any agency. This is the most straightforward open question on the site and the easiest for a member of Congress or a reporter to put in writing: what did agencies report, and where is it?
The commissioners of the agency that owns vote.gov are fired
The President removes the three remaining Election Assistance Commission members (Thomas Hicks, Benjamin Hovland, and Christy McCormick) leaving the only federal agency dedicated solely to election administration without a quorum and unable to act. A White House official cited the Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. Slaughter, which held that the President may remove leaders of independent agencies.
Hold this against the sequence above. In late June the EAC told reporters the Studio's vote.gov project was paused and the live site remained under its control. Eleven days later the commissioners who would approve or refuse such a project were gone, and the preview on White House infrastructure was still there.
The Massachusetts court rules on the order
The District of Massachusetts issues its memorandum and order in the challenge to Sections 2 and 3 of EO 14399. Intervenor states defended the Confirmed Citizen Lists as organizing information already in the executive branch's possession, and as supporting the President's duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
Whatever the Studio builds will outlive the office that built it.
The Studio closes
A temporary organization under 5 U.S.C. § 3161, three years from signing. The systems it built get inherited by agencies that had no say in their design.
The records stay sealed
Studio records sit with the Executive Office of the President under the Presidential Records Act, which can restrict several categories of material long after the administration leaves office.