A chatbot as the front door to the federal government

The executive order published on whitehouse.gov on September 29 calls America.gov the “unified digital front door to the Federal Government for every individual”: a place where a person signs in with Login.gov, types in plain language, gets answers and — where authorized and technically feasible — completes tasks without going through each agency's website. The General Services Administration runs it, working with the National Design Studio and OMB; OMB has 90 days to issue the implementing memorandum, a deadline The Register also confirms. Integration is mandatory for public-facing federal online services with more than 100,000 users over twelve months, except IRS tax services and those sensitive to national security at the Department of War and in the intelligence community.

On the engine behind the answers, the sources disagree. U.S. chief design officer Joe Gebbia named Google's Gemini and xAI's Grok, as reported by FedScoop, The Register and CNBC; Nextgov/FCW, by contrast, writes that the language model was unclear. Google confirmed its role on the company blog, in a post signed by Jim Kelly, vice president, Federal, at Google Public Sector: “Google is proud to be named a technology partner in this vital initiative, leveraging Gemini to help more than 100 million people access critical public resources with greater speed and ease.” There is no verified statement from xAI itself, and nobody has explained how work is split between the two models. Contract details and costs are missing.

On data handling, the portal's privacy policy — according to The Register (it could not be accessed directly) — describes Zero Data Retention agreements with the AI providers: prompts and responses are not stored and not used for training. Generated answers are cached on Cloudflare for up to two hours, keyed by a hash of the prompt; Cloudflare security logs, which may contain the IP address, are kept for twelve months, and approximate location may be used. The order requires each agency to keep custody of its own records and says the unified access must not become a centralized system of federal records; it calls for data minimization and preserves existing channels — in person, phone, mail, agency websites — “so that America.gov provides a better option but does not become the only option”.

What the portal does today, according to FedScoop, The Register and Nextgov, is answer questions and send people on to agency websites, drawing on roughly 29,000 government sites. Direct transactions are promised for 2027, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio has set a specific target: “By the end of 2027, our goal is for the vast majority of Americans to be able to apply for a passport or passport card on America.gov.” Mikey Dickerson, formerly of the U.S. Digital Service, noted that what has been solved so far is “the easiest 5% of the problem”. The available sources include no measure of answer accuracy and no data on the risk of wrong information about procedures and benefits — which, on a Social Security question or a deadline, is not just any mistake — and The Register flags readability problems, not yet measured in any public accessibility test.

The interesting part isn't the chatbot, it's the verb. As long as America.gov answers and redirects, the cost of an error falls on whoever trusts an answer without opening the link; once it starts filling out passport applications, that cost becomes a botched application inside a real system. So far no one has published how often it gets things wrong, and that is the only number that would turn the 2027 deadline into more than an announcement.

— Olya