A modular agent skill for operating inside the National Design Studio mandate — modernizing ~27,000 federal domains, paper forms, signage systems, and front-desk service flows before July 4, 2026. Two skills, one knowledge base, ten agents.
A founder-designer is asked to redraw the interface of a federal government across 27,000 domains, six stressed citizen archetypes, and every paper form on every desk — in twelve months.
The America by Design initiative, established by Executive Order 14338 on August 21, 2025, created a temporary studio inside the Executive Office of the President. Its remit: improve the usability and aesthetics of federal digital services, improve physical service environments, reduce duplicated design cost through standardized systems, and produce visible results by July 4, 2026.
This skill package operationalizes the public role of the Chief Design Officer leading that mandate. It does not impersonate the person. It models the position — a product-minded executive working at the seam between private-sector velocity and public-sector accountability.
It ships in three artifacts: a single-agent SKILL.md for advisory and assessment work, a multi-agent SWARM.md for full-service redesigns, and a canonical NDS_KB.md grounding every claim in statute, baseline, and tension.
Treat the website, the form, the kiosk, the queue, the wall sign, the staff script, the confirmation email, and the design system behind all of it as one product.
The skill produces a strategic assessment, a friction map from arrival to appeal, a design-system alignment against USWDS, a physical-digital translation for offices and signage, a risk register against ten public-sector categories, and an executive decision brief that separates what can ship now from what requires governance.
The swarm decomposes the same problem across ten specialized agents — Coordinator, Civic Research, Service Blueprint, Design System, Brand Architect, Accessibility, Physical Environment, Policy & Risk, Implementation, Communications — with structured handoffs and a non-negotiable launch gate.
// ACCESSIBILITY IS NOT NEGOTIABLE. NEITHER IS THE PHYSICAL OFFICE.
Every interaction answers: where am I, what can I do, what's needed from me, what happens next, how long, and who is responsible.
Remove duplicate forms, repeated logins, PDF-only flows. Preserve identity verification, fraud prevention, appeal rights.
USWDS is not decoration. It is recognizable navigation, shared form patterns, lower agency maintenance, higher public trust.
Retirement, taxes, disability, immigration, disaster recovery. Assume tired, anxious, low-bandwidth, neurodivergent users.
Digital flows must map to paper forms, signage, front-desk scripts, waiting rooms, kiosks, staff dashboards, escalation.
AI inventories, migrates, drafts, tests. AI does not adjudicate eligibility, certify accessibility, or replace human escalation.
Tribal nations, rural/offline users, multilingual communities, disability-specific service lines. If removal makes a population's service worse, the variation stays.
Public services cannot behave like consumer beta software.
▶ Watch · Launch date set before legal & a11y review scheduled.Civic neutrality is not optional. Citizenship is not a consumer event.
▶ Watch · Marketing-style language inside eligibility or enforcement flows.Institutional capability must survive the launch.
▶ Watch · AI/vendor component with no agency-side maintainer named.Some service lines cannot be smoothed into one visual register.
▶ Watch · Population-specific needs deferred to "phase 2."TechForce-style pipelines bring both.
▶ Watch · Advisor on procurement is in line to win the contract.A Coordinator orchestrates nine specialists. They diagnose in parallel, redesign in sequence, and pass through a launch gate that names every dropped safeguard as a blocker — not a phase-two ticket.
Service purpose, user groups, traffic, failures, accessibility status, ownership.
Arrival → orientation → eligibility → form → upload → review → confirm → status → appeal.
USWDS, § 508, IDEA Act, Plain Writing Act, WCAG 2.0 AA. Default to reuse.
New journey, reduced steps, IA, components, content rewrite, a11y checklist.
Website language → signage. Form → paper form. Status → staff script.
A11y · privacy · security · legal · procurement · neutrality · exclusion · vendor.
What ships now · what gets standardized · what stays local · success metrics.
27,000 federal interfaces — each a discrete point in a fragmented service landscape.
The pointillist field at right represents the pre-NDS federal interface surface. Each dot is a domain or subdomain operating with decentralized procurement, agency-specific design choices, and uneven USWDS adoption. The red points are the canonical service archetypes the skill always reasons about: SSA, IRS, USCIS, passport, VA, FEMA.
// THE PROBLEM IS NOT VOLUME. IT IS COHERENCE.