Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia has joined President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Effectiveness (DOGE). Gebbia, a close friend of Elon Musk and a billionaire, has announced his mission to "improve the slow and paper-based retirement process," but the specifics of his involvement are unclear.
"I'm excited to share that I will be bringing my designer mind and entrepreneurial spirit to government," Gebia announced on X. "The most important thing I can think of is volunteering to improve user experience within government."
Musk has complained that the current system for processing retirement applications is too slow and too restrictive due to the use of paper records that are manually reviewed. A converted mine in Pennsylvania is currently used to store and process 400 million printed government documents, occupying 26,000 filing cabinets. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management announced Thursday that it processed a complete retirement application digitally for the first time, completing the task in two days, "without printing a single piece of paper" and instead of the weeks it normally takes.
It's unclear whether Gebbia's position at DOGE is a salaried position. Although Gebbia left Airbnb in 2022, he remained an important shareholder and board member of Airbnb, and he joined the Tesla board in the same year. In response to Gebia's appointment as DOGE director, some Airbnb users and landlords posted on the rental platform's community forum threatening to boycott the service and calling on Airbnb to distance itself from the co-founder.
Gebbia similarly incurred the wrath of the Airbnb community last month when he revealed he was voting for Trump in the November election. Gebbia has been a Democratic donor until 2023 and criticized Trump's "heartless, cruel, and immoral" family separation policy during his last presidential term. After a self-proclaimed "awakening", his appointment as director of the National Office for Gender Equality further solidified his commitment to the MAGA ethos.