america.gov
The US government launched a single front door to every federal website once before. September 22, 2000. Bill Clinton announced it by webcast, gave the team 90 days, and a Berkeley professor named Eric Brewer donated the search engine for free.
That site is still online. It got renamed USA.gov in 2007. In one 2024 survey, 13% of users said they’d recommend it.
FirstGov indexed 27 million pages and let you search by topic instead of by agency. The press release reads almost word for word like today’s pitch, right down to the demo use cases of student loans and campground reservations.
So what went wrong the first time, and what’s different now?
The government never owned the engine. Brewer’s nonprofit paid his own company Inktomi to write the code, the code stayed proprietary, the donation was scheduled to dissolve in 2003, and GSA ended up having to procure a replacement from scratch. The front door was borrowed technology sitting on top of 22 agencies passing a hat to fund it.
America.gov runs on Gemini and Grok. Gebbia called them “great partners behind the scenes” this morning, and reporters couldn’t get an answer on how the models were procured. Borrowed engine, again.
The structural difference is the executive order. Clinton’s 1999 memo asked agencies to put their top 500 forms online. Today’s order directs every agency to integrate its public-facing services into America.gov, which means the door and the rooms behind it finally answer to the same person. Whether this version ages better than the last one comes down to that line, not the chat interface.
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Instead of opening a bunch of tabs across different agency sites and trying to figure out which information actually matters to you, you can ask America a question and get the relevant answer from across 29,000+ official government websites, with the source and what to do next.
This looks better than any tech keynote since forever https://t.co/1VtnBirNko
— Alex MacGregor (@alexmacgregor__) September 30, 2026
