Trump's Chief Design Officer Just Boosted the John Birch Society
Joe Gebbia, one of the founders of Airbnb, blamed immigrants for rising housing costs.
Don Moynihan is the J. Ira and Nicki Harris Family Professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan Ford School of Public Policy Subscribe to his Can We Still Govern? Substack.
Joe Gebbia, the U.S. Chief Design Officer appointed by Trump to lead the new National Design Studio, recently boosted anti-immigrant claims by the John Birch Society. The guy whose entire job is branding the U.S .government aligned himself with a group that has been spouting conspiratorial and hateful nonsense for decades. Gebbia is also one of Airbnb’s three co-founders and so his complaints about immigrants raising the costs of housing feel especially hypocritical.
The post above was reported by independent tech journalist Matt Binder and has now apparently been deleted. However, it is not an anomaly. Gebbia’s feed is full of far-right MAGA messaging, most frequently falsely portraying immigrants as violent criminals who threaten natives. He also reposted the John Birch Society just a couple of days before.
It’s not just immigration. Here is a post he made about how DEI is destroying merit. This seems to be based on a right-wing criticism that Caitlin Clark is being targeted by Black players. Using basketball as an example of how Black people are exploiting DEI to deny White merit is the kind of thing you do when you’ve cooked your brain on X. He is one more example of life under our clicktatorship.
What Is the John Birch Society?
In his defense, maybe Gebbia does not know the history of the John Birch Society. So let’s do a brief recap. It best represents what Richard Hofstader described as the paranoid style of politics of the cold war era. The Birch Society is the grandaddy of conspiracy theories like Birtherism, QAnon, and the Big Lie that Trump won the 2020 election.
How bad was the Birch Society? It’s leader claimed that President Eisenhower was a secret communist agent.
In one telling of American conservatism, a critical moment is when William F. Buckley Jr. denounced the Birch Society in the 1960s, pushing it to the fringe of the movement.
But the Birch Society never went away. The taste for conspiracism has always existed, and Trump just pushed into the mainstream. Birch Society ideas are also very much in vogue: opposition to the UN, civil rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, and federal power generally. The Birch Society’s anti-fluoridation stance also presaged RFK Jr.’s efforts in this area. Anything they disliked was labeled as a communist plot.
The Birch Society has not changed. It’s views are the same. What has changed is the widespread embrace of these views. Early backers included the father of the Koch brothers, and Harry Bradley of the Bradley Foundation, forces which still shape American politics today. What has changed is that the rich men aligned with it are now running our government.
The Society’s relationship with race is especially troubling. They argued that extending equal rights to Blacks were was part of a communist plot, that Black people in America already had “complete freedom.”
The immigration position of the Birch Society is standard Great Replacement theory with some even more conspiratorial twists: shadowy elites are using migration to make the US become part of something called the the “North American Union”: “This plan is supported by the establishment-oriented leadership of both parties, along with the Deep State and cultural Marxists” according to the Society website.
This is what Gebbia is promoting. If this isn’t crossing the line, then where is the line?
Update: after this post went live, a spokesperson from the Birch Society reached out me to say the following:
“You could have been a bit more original in your criticisms. These talking point retreads have all been disproven multiple times. But you would have had to do more than a Google search to get those. We are just happy so many people are agreeing to things we have said for nearly 70 years.”
Gebbia’s Complaints about Housing are Hypocritical
Gebbia’s Birch society post blames immigrants for rising housing costs. Given that a lot of people blame Airbnbfor unaffordable housing, this seems like a rich guy who scapegoating immigrants for a large social problem he has helped to create.
What does the evidence say? In a nutshell, both immigrants and Airbnb have contributed to increased housing costs, but the size of the effects are generally seen as small, and immigrants are also directly involved in expanding housing supply.
A bit more on immigrants: A seminal research paper by Albert Saiz suggested that immigrants increases costs by about 1% when they increased the population by the same amount. Later work questioned that estimate as being too high, since it failed to account for how immigrants already moved to growing cities. When immigrants go to locations that are not booming (see, e.g. Haitians who will soon be expelled from parts of Ohio), they prop up a local economy.
More to the point, immigrants build housing. They make up about 1 in 4 of the construction workforce. At a moment when construction jobs are going unfilled, targeting immigrants will mean fewer houses built, and higher costs per house. A Federal Reserve research paper noted that the type of immigration shutdowns that Gebbia supports disproportionately negatively affect the construction industry. Those contributions might plausibly offset housing price increases created by the arrival of immigrants. Another Federal Reserve paper that Gebbia has promoted argues that immigrants increase housing by a higher amount without offsetting gains in supply.
What about Airbnb? The most cited study found that Airbnb contributed to about one-fifth of observed rent growth and one-seventh of observed price growth in the median zip code, and shifted the housing supply from long-term to short-term rentals. These effects appear to be larger in with higher owner-occupancy areas, which tends to correlate with more touristy regions. That’s why some local governments, mostly in Europe but also in places like New York City, have sharply regulated or even banned Airbnb.
So it seems a bit rich for Gebbia to blame immigrants for housing cost increases. If that is his primary concern, he should be as aggressive in supporting regulation of his former company as he is in supporting anti-immigrant policies. Given his connection to Airbnb, he would be a uniquely powerful advocate!
What has the National Design Studio Actually Done?
Maybe you are willing to be OK with Gebbia’s private views if he brings a lot of value to government. But a) the value he brings to government looks pretty limited thus far, b) those views are not private, and c) they are likely discouraging the ability of the Trump administration to hire talented technologists.
Let’s look at the record of the organization he runs. The National Design Studio was created by Trump in August 2025. It is a White House unit that fills a real niche, but the focus seems to be mostly about better branding of government services and websites, rather than making the underlying services work better.
So far, the NDS boasts of having built several websites, including NDStudio.gov and AmericaByDesign.gov (the office’s own sites), TrumpCard.gov (selling pathways to American citizenship for rich people — some immigrants are fine!), TrumpRx.gov (a drug-pricing portal), RealFood.gov (a MAHA nutrition site), TrumpAccounts.gov (children’s savings accounts), and Freedom.gov (not actually functioning right now).
But the NDS has drawn a lot of criticism:
Skins vs. services: the National Design Studio is building a handful of attractive single page websites, but not fixing digital services that most of the public relies on when they interact with government. Skins is easy to do, but not very impactful.
Low accessibility: Disability advocates say the sites do not meet federal guidelines.
A reliance on poor code, likely AI-generated: If you like images of kids with extra toes, or a U.S. flag missing stars, the NDS has you covered.
Privacy concerns: Some NDS sites were using commercial software to track visitors without legally required disclosures. It is also collecting data on users without a clear data retention policy.
Favoring private allies: A NDS-built MAHA website directed users to Elon Musk’s Grok to get health advice, which required a sign-up for ongoing use.
Failure on key goals: NDS was asked to create branding and standards consistency across the federal government but has failed to do so. Even the small number of pages it has designed look different from one another. Individual agencies do not seem to be working with NDS, and the move toward common digital standards appears to have stalled.
To be clear, some of the problems on accessibility, tracking and promoting of private allies were later fixed. The pattern is: NDS would do something that broke a law or looked ethically bad, and then fixed it when questioned. Thats not great, but not terrible.
The most serious critique is that there is no “there” there, it’s all hat and no cattle. Here, it is useful to understand that the NDS team seems to be less skilled and less ambitious than the organization it replaced, 18F.
Christopher Butler, a digital designer who went to college with Gebbia, expressed the view of many in the civic tech community when he labeled NDS a “scam”:
[W]e were already doing what Gebbia claims he’ll accomplish in three years. The 18F team had years of experience navigating federal bureaucracy, understanding regulatory constraints, and working within existing governmental structures—precisely the institutional knowledge required for meaningful reform.
Waldo Jaquith, a senior technologist with extensive federal experience told me: “They have solved zero design problems, advanced nothing of value, created nothing that anybody will reuse.”
At this point, we are now in pretty inside baseball debates about tech in government. But this context is important to understand when media outlets present Gebbia as a transformative visionary, see, e.g. this Free Press boosterism from Bari Weiss’s sister.
The Trump Admin. Struggles to Recruit Tech Talent
The National Design Studio and the Trump administration more broadly appears to have a tech talent problem. A primary NDS engineer is Ed Coristine, the DOGE alum better known for his nickname (Big Balls) rather than his skills.
DOGE purged skilled technologists and has not replaced them. Late last year, the Trump administration launched Tech Force, which has been promoted by the NDS. Tech Force was proposed to recruit 1000 new technologists by as early as March of this year, but by May had only recruited 10 people.
I’ve been talking to a lot of tech people who joined government over the last few years. Basically, the key to get the best people, the people of extraordinary skill who could earn more money elsewhere, is pretty simple: prosocial motivation. They want to do extraordinary work that will help lots of people.
The problem for the Trump administration is that people with high prosocial motivation typically don’t want to work for white nationalists. Many might still join an administration, knowing they disagree with Trump, if they could be offered a meaningful apolitical role, but building single page websites does not fit the bill.
Imagine if a prospective recruit reads Gebbia’s feed and see about one banal post about the National Design Studio for every 10 posts featuring right wing tropes against immigrants, Blacks and Muslims. Is that the guy you want to work for? Potential hires see neither an organization that provides space to do valuable or apolitical work.
This does not mean Gebbia won’t succeed in recruiting people. But his public statements are shrinking the pool of willing workers to MAGA-heads, or those who see it as an an entry point to the Silicon Valley right-wing funding networks. These are not going to be the best of the best, and they are not going to be motivated to do really good work.
In short, Gebbia’s profile is going to turn off exactly the people he needs to make the NDS work. It’s one more example of how the Trump administration cares more about promoting their divisive ideologies than actually serving the public.
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LOL as if his own business model isn't a chief cause in traditional vacation/retirement venues like lake/mountain/resort towns and shoreline areas and in the walkable center of large cities. Pants. On. Fire.
If I remember correctly, John Birch was supposed to be. the first U.S. soldier killed by the Communists. In the Korean War maybe? Anyhow, give a listen to the great song “John Birch Society” by Chad Mitchell Trio.