As other Western countries modernize their online services, America’s have remained maddeningly clunky. Between a US citizen and a US government service stands a bewildering array of forms and bureaucratic arcana. Even more inconveniently, some government services remain analog. Infamously, a federal worker’s retirement can take months to process. Those retirement claims are handled in a labyrinthine former mine in Pennsylvania. This subterranean library of Babel can take months to process a claim. Make a single misspelling, and you could be set back by weeks.

In total, Americans must between them spend more than a billion hours per year navigating this vast and ugly bureaucracy. Anyone who has ever encountered it should be pleased to learn that the White House has ordered a drastic overhaul: nearly 30,000 government websites yoked into a single portal. As of this week, America.gov provides a landing page and an LLM chat bar. The LLM can guide you through registering a business, finding a job, applying for a passport and so on. It’s elegant and convenient, if not yet revolutionary.

Donald Trump, who launched the website on Tuesday, was effusive. “We’re simplifying it,” he said. “We’re glamorizing it. We’re making it what it should be.” He hailed Joe Gebbia, the Airbnb co-founder he appointed as America’s “chief design officer”, as a “mastermind”.

The more dramatic overhaul will come next year. On Tuesday, Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, demonstrated the ease with which Americans will soon be able to order their first passport. It took little longer than ordering a pizza. From next year, he promised, government services will all be handled via the same simple portal. “No printed forms, no prior appointment, no queues, no intermediaries,” said Rubio.

Naturally, there has been some sniping about America.gov. As critics have pointed out, the existing LLM contradicts some of Trump’s views — including the matter of Joe Biden’s election victory in 2020, which Trump disputes.

But the easing of nationwide bureaucratic pain, and the administering of some design elegance to the way people most commonly interact with the government, ought to achieve non-partisan approval. Only the most fervid never-Trumper would argue that the European Union’s equivalent webpage is superior to the sharp serifs and clean background of America.gov. Europe’s landing page connotes ill-focused planning by committee; America’s is simple and direct, its LLM chat bar hovering above a carousel of softcore Americana. The invitation to “Try ‘How do I book a campsite in a national park?’”, for instance, is decorated with a photo of three teenagers beside a forested lake, one of them leaping into the water. The effect, then, is both familiar and understatedly futuristic. In this, the website represents one of the more compelling partnerships between MAGA and Silicon Valley — not least because bureaucracy is nowhere to be seen.

Assuming that next year’s promised improvements become reality, will the overhaul last? The project owes its existence to that fragile alliance between MAGA and technologists. Indeed, the overhaul was sparked by DOGE, which brought to light the absurdity of “the mine”. And Gebbia himself, formerly a Democrat donor, was a late convert to Trumpism. Whether future governments will maintain the Silicon Valley alliance, encouraging top talent to rethink government services, remains to be seen. A Democratic administration, being the political representative of the managerial class, might be less willing to sweep away bureaucrats. Few would deny that the mine is inefficient — but would President AOC really side with the move-fast-and-break-things crowd over the pencil-pushers she might expect to support her?

More profoundly, it is no coincidence that government services, whether in the US or elsewhere, are almost always clunkier and uglier than their consumer-focused counterparts. Governments are larger and slower than companies. Citizens are easier to neglect than customers. And bureaucracies tend to expand. These forces are slow-moving but potent — and are now in contest with the countervailing force of AI, which has been essential to the redesign.

Awful websites and long waits, one might venture, are natural protuberances of democracy. They cannot be slain like dragons. Instead, they are better thought of as recurrent weeds — hacked back every few years rather than seen off for good.