America.gov (america.gov)

163 pointsby plesiv8 hours ago127 comments

maherbeg 6 hours ago

OK, there's a lot of negative comments here, but this is a great idea at a high level. It really is hard to figure out where to do a thing and it's also very easy to get phished. If they can figure out how to help people get all the services they're eligible for that'll be an amazing improvement for the people.

gthrow12345 4 hours ago

I agree in general, but how do you resolve the problem that people will take the output of the chatbot as authoritative even when it could possibly have errors or miss important nuance? People being lead astray with information from the government could lead to very serious consequences, up to and including imprisonment.

Honest question, I had the same issue when my work wanted me to stick a chatbot in front of our HR portal and I never resolved it to my satisfaction.

maherbeg 2 hours ago

Painfully this will fall to the court decide and create the precedence here. If this is an official government app, then the onus probably is on the government to provide correct information? Who knows, it could go either way and the courts could say "you're on the hook".

I don't think we have a good answer for liability here, like for Tesla FSD, Waymo, or even the current frontier models.

fragmede 2 hours ago

What happens now if someone uses traditional search and comes across an outdated wiki or Confluence page with outdated/wrong/bad instructions, or interprets something incorrectly?

BalinKing 32 minutes ago

At least as I see it, it would be just as unacceptable for a "normal" government website to be dangerously outdated.

Spooky23 26 minutes ago

You can reference the source.

My team experimented with this a couple of years ago with a complex government regulatory body of knowledge.

Google and Microsoft have APIs that will ground with and reference the specific policy documents, which helps. Even then, it was more useful as a job aid for people already knowledgeable of the data than for a layman.

With all LLMs, the quality of the question correlates with the quality of the answer.

rayiner 12 minutes ago

[delayed]

makeitdouble 12 minutes ago

I don't know for the gov. For HR, the best approach I've seen is to have source and links extremely prominent and have the bot speak like a mascot ("bip bip boop I'm the HR bot" style)

People don't read disclaimers nor warnings about the content, but usually won't come to the HR to complain a mascot fed them weird info they didn't bother to check.

schainks an hour ago

Yes, but what AI powers the backend right now? Grok? Who's in charge of that and being paid for compute?

impulser_ an hour ago

I believe it's a mix of Gemini and Grok. They are probably providing the compute for free.

eli an hour ago

I very much doubt it's free.

tombert an hour ago

Yeah, I was curious if it was going to try and bombard me with a bunch of bullshit about how wonderful our glorious Trump godking is, but honestly the information it gave was reasonable enough.

ryanmcbride 32 minutes ago

I asked it the following:

how many felonies has the president of the united states been charged with?

>I can't answer questions about criminal charges or other news about the President. That's outside America's scope

has biden ever been convicted of a crime?

>I did not find official records of a criminal conviction for Joseph R. Biden Jr.

>Official sources in this search discuss other matters (for example, a pardon for Robert Hunter Biden), not a conviction of Joseph R. Biden Jr. I cannot independently confirm a complete nationwide criminal-history search from these pages

>[Link to Department of Justice Pardon warrant (Hunter Biden)]

has any other president ever been convicted of a crime?

>Yes. A Congressional Research Service brief reports that on May 30, 2024, former President Donald J. Trump was convicted in New York state court of 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree

Funny that it would only talk about trump's convictions after bringing up hunter biden.

groundzeros2015 27 minutes ago

What’s the implication here?

Retric 19 minutes ago

>I can't answer questions about criminal charges or other news about the President. That's outside America's scope

That it was specifically engineered to give that response. Thus political pressure was applied to the design.

The funny bit was just humorous. There’s likely many ways to get that same information without referencing Biden.

mjmsmith 25 minutes ago

> That's outside America's scope

We know, we know.

jedbrooke 36 minutes ago

> If they can figure out how to help people get all the services they're eligible for that'll be an amazing improvement for the people.

I agree that that’s a good end goal, but how does a chatbot accomplish this better than a FAQ page? The only only advantage I see for the chatbot is volume of information, but that’s also kind of the problem. It’s spewing 1000s of words of information with no vetting. And sure, hiring humans to write the FAQ pages would cost a lot of money, but that’s what taxes are for.

Dwedit 31 minutes ago

People don't know that you can search for text within a page. They really do need the chatbot for that.

jeffnv an hour ago

Hey it got the 2020 election results right, that's a relief

mellosouls 6 hours ago

I haven't tried this but in principle I think this sort of finding a needle in a haystack situation (finding the correct path to assistance in a government service) is one of the rare circumstances where a well-crafted chatbot can be genuinely useful rather than just irritating.

scun 6 hours ago

or a well-crafted static website

nfw2 6 hours ago

no, static documents are not an ideal way to find a needle in a haystack

graemep 6 hours ago

They can be with decent search and if well organised. gov.uk works pretty well as it is and I suspect adding a chatbot would make it worse.

nfw2 an hour ago

1. decent search, if you mean something other than what the browser provides, isn't part of a static document

2. the nature of the problem statement "needle in a haystack" suggests obstacles to traditional text search, eg. too many false positives to be helpful for natural searches and challenges to constructing more specific ones.

language models introduce new possible solutions to this ie semantic search. poorly-designed chatbots could be worse than a basic search, sure

Xirdus 6 hours ago

Having used various "ask AI" features in various work tools over the last half a year for looking up project designs, documentation, chat logs, meeting notes etc., I can tell you even a half assed AI chatbot is a huge improvement over the pre-AI state of things for this use case.

dreadsword 6 hours ago

I've tried it - I've been playing around with a vibe coded application that crawls municipal websites, indexes and embeds, and then does rag retrieval. It came from the need to dig up specific information that's scattered across PDFs, multiple web pages, etc. - exactly as you described. AI does a decent job (w/ RAG) of synthesizing.

https://opencity.services/chat/winnipeg

how do i report a noise complaint?

It depends on the type of noise:

- Loud party or people-related noise: call the Winnipeg Police Service non-emergency line at 204-986-6222.

- Animals making unreasonably loud, unnecessary or excessive noises: report it through 3-1-1.

- Mechanical equipment noise like furnaces or air conditioners, or noise from construction tools used by a company or resident: contact Community By-law Enforcement Services at 3-1-1.

- Planned event noise: you may need a Noise Permit at no cost, but it is not for construction work and should be submitted at least four weeks before the event.

The City also says noise-generating activities within 150 metres of a residential property are generally prohibited before 7 a.m. and after 9 p.m. on weekdays, and before 9 a.m. and after 9 p.m. on Saturdays, Sundays and statutory holidays.

------

YMMV. A big part of the backend is categorizing hits and misses, with an eye to helping municipalities clean up conflicting information, fill obvious gaps, etc.

cucumber3732842 6 hours ago

This works fine when you're sicking enforcement on someone and don't really care, the bigger the blast radius the better, you just want to know who to call.

Where it falls apart is "how do I" type questions because usually the legally factual answer is some huge complex state diagram where three local and four state agencies theoretically have discretionary jurisdiction over a your petty af project or business but the in practice answer is that some agency rubber stamps them all with minimal fuss. You can't make the legally factual answer clear because the degree to which people support the status quo is largely predicated on ignorance, but you also can't come out and say in writing that you have a policy of rubber stamping boring stuff.

Basically the same reasons that all but the most minor and narrowly targeted attempts at permitting reform fail.

The thought is nice but in reality you're basically asking the government to give up power and it takes obscene amounts of political capital to force that to happen in most cases.

sssilver 6 hours ago

If anyone's wondering how this works, it looks like[1] Gemini + guardrails:

> 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

[1] https://blog.google/company-news/outreach-and-initiatives/pu...

cjonas 14 minutes ago

This thing is obviously fully vibe coded... Click the "what's coming next" and under the healthcare section the marketing screenshot contains broken images... Like no one ever looked at this before deploying it?

amelius an hour ago

This is just the annoying AI Chat Robot you see on websites, but now for the government.

jayturley 42 minutes ago

Privacy: "Your messages aren’t saved by America.gov, and your chat disappears when you leave. Some answers may be cached for up to two hours."

What about the model? My understanding is those queries are saved by the model provider.

Given this administration, and the privacy issues with the official WH app, this feels very misleading.

bb123 36 minutes ago

Not necessarily - there are tons of zero data retention (ZDR) model hosting options, including big players like Amazon.

echelon 33 minutes ago

You can use all the flagship models on Amazon Bedrock and have a contractually obligated air gap between your data and the model providers.

TZubiri 25 minutes ago

Often not, vendors like OpenAI or OpenAI through Azure might retain messages for safety reasons if they activate some safety filter, but it won't use it for training.

riskable 6 hours ago

I tried to get it to generate code but it says that's forbidden by its system prompt. However, it was happy to recommend Python modules for accessing api.data.gov.

SparkyDogs 6 hours ago

the guardrails on it seem pretty strong as I've tried a variety of prompt injections but have been unsuccessful.

blooalien 6 hours ago

> ... as I've tried a variety of prompt injections ...

Well... You're a terrorist now. You can expect a visit from the FBI and/or ICE any minute now.

SparkyDogs 6 hours ago

my tax dollars are paying for these tokens so I should be allowed to use them as I see fit

jezzamon 6 hours ago

My tax dollars pay for the police, so I should be able to... ?

6510 an hour ago

yes but with quite a few extra steps.

VCFundedGenYer 3 hours ago

That’s adorable if you think that’s how this works.

dhx 5 hours ago

My most interesting findings from a troll session after introducing myself as "Sleepy Joe" (model obviously knows what this means and guardrails refuse to entertain the topic) were:

Q: "Where can I find a NASA comic book about women astronauts?"

A (summarised): Press release for the "Callie Rodriguez" comic book that now has only dead links / private YouTube video, and a forgotten SoundCloud account that survived the DOGE purge. Dead link provided to the NASA web page that used to exist officially for this comic book.

Indicates training data predates the DOGE .gov website purge?

Q: "What is 2+2" (and similar math problems)

A (summarised): Grudgingly answered as "4" despite most off-topic prompts being refused.

Seemingly it'll do maths homework for free :)

empath75 3 hours ago

I have been very tempted to but don't know if that is literally a crime or not, lol.

pdevr 6 hours ago

Regardless of any other disagreements, this is an excellent idea. Hoping the execution does not wander asunder.

internet2000 an hour ago

It works well. Pretty nice. I asked about what do I need to know before digging in my backyard and it told me all the right things, referring me to my local govt website for permits.

Shank 6 hours ago

I like the voice button that isn't actually a button, but just an icon.

unreal6 7 hours ago

Love that the "chat" functionality is just throwing 429s too. Unusable.

cvhc 6 hours ago

I asked about my visa administrative processing that has been stuck for 6 months. I'm going to use this response, which is well grounded and "official", in my writ of mandamus petition:

> A Spanish State Department page still says most cases finish within 60 days of the interview, but that is not a deadline and some take much longer. [1] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/inmigrac...

Good.

dhx 5 hours ago

Also see [1] for planned feature additions that appears from screenshots to include collection of personal data, for features including:

- Enrol in Medicare.

- Apply for a passport.

- Find a job in federal government by uploading a resume/CV and having currently advertised jobs deemed most relevant returned.

[1] https://america.gov/coming-soon

terminal-bloom an hour ago

Step one: fire the excellent US Digital Service along with a large swath of the actual workers who made the Federal Government function.

Step two: hire some Silicon Valley creeps to make a chatbot.

Step three: Profit???

arionhardison 5 hours ago

I have been working on something like this, but it actually does things and is not only chat. Each "Gov. official" has their own AI agent that can fulfill intents by navigating a protocol which is just a workflow of a Gov. process

example: https://samhsa.dev/ example: https://samhsa.dev/protocol/76526

Still VERY MUCH a work in progress but I have successfully been able to have some people get things done. I am doing some federal agencies and also trying to get cities working now.

https://san-francisco.ca.us.codify.city

2001zhaozhao an hour ago

If the AI they use is reliable, this is actually pretty cool.

frereubu an hour ago

That "if" is doing such an incredible amount of work I think we could use it to power the entire US grid.

groundzeros2015 26 minutes ago

Why? Aren’t there many vendors offering this technology?

demibabs an hour ago

Doesn’t even work for me (on iPhone). If I click enter I just get sent to the Cloudflare verification screen instead.

Edit: this is caused by the fact I was using a VPN.

some_furry 25 minutes ago

I asked, "What happened on January 6, 2021?" and its answer is, I think, telling: https://imgur.com/a/e1H8NvK

r721 an hour ago

>The Trump administration’s new chatbot aimed at helping Americans navigate official government websites is powered by artificial intelligence from Google ’s Gemini and Elon Musk’s Grok, U.S. Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia said Tuesday.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/29/trump-ai-gemini-grok.html

valleyer 7 hours ago

Your NIH is showing: usa.gov already existed

donohoe 7 hours ago

USA.gov = 800KB

america.gov = 25MB (before you start scrolling)

Feels janky too.

studmuffin650 7 hours ago

The photos didn't even load for me.

devy 6 hours ago

Yep, not only that America.gov FAILED the web accessibility test:

America.gov has 1 ERROR and FAILED TO LOAD - this is violating Federal laws. Class action suits anyone?

https://wave.webaim.org/report#/america.gov

Meanwhile the old USA.gov works and loading and no errors (some warnings are expected)

https://wave.webaim.org/report#/usa.gov

repeekad 3 hours ago

You act like their friends haven't already drafted the lawsuit before the site even launched.

Lack of trust in authority is a sad slippery slope.

locknitpicker 6 hours ago

> america.gov = 25MB (before you start scrolling)

Yuge.

So notable, they are considering renaming JavaScript to AmericaScript.

6510 an hour ago

I can see it already...

document.registerElement('AmericaScript',{prototype:Object.create(HTMLScriptElement.prototype)});

piratebroadcast 44 minutes ago

FYI, America.gov accepts the Konomi Code.

Shalomboy 39 minutes ago

I don't think that's true.

HaZeust 12 minutes ago

I'm not seeing this.

"Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A", inside or outside of the input field, does nothing.

Cider9986 7 hours ago

The Whitehouse learned about vibecoding. See this and arcade.gov.

Also, what?? https://america.gov/privacy

At least realfood.gov was decent [1].

Shouldn't the government websites work on very slow internet connections?

Where's the source code for these websites? First of all, if they are vibe coded by government employees they have to be open source, and secondly, if they are vibe coded (even by a contractor), then they can't be copyrighted.

[1] https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/04/national-design-...

Edit: it says this one is made by the National design studio at the bottom.

wmiel 6 hours ago

arcade.gov has "Border Patrol along the Rio Grande" game, wtf's wrong with you America these days?

It seems like a pretty crappy idea for a game funded with public money. It's a bad joke about a real, nuanced problem where people are actually losing their lives. What will be next? 'Hit that Iranian school' the game?

1attice 6 hours ago

Yes, probably. Americans love this stuff

blooalien 6 hours ago

> Americans love this stuff

Only a certain subset of us that happen to be fond of repeatedly shooting ourselves in the foot and acting like spoiled children in adult bodies with no actual adults in the room. The rest of us are genuinely horrified that our country is now run by mentally challenged psychotic lunatics.

epiccoleman 6 hours ago

we've totally earned this, so i'm not offended by what you've said. but i'll just step in here to say i fucking hate this stuff.

you could easily argue that there are plenty of things our government has done that matter much more in the grand scheme of things, but the rampant twitter / x meme posts and absolute horseshit like this "arcade" site disgust me. it's not funny or cute, it's despicable.

blooalien 6 hours ago

> it's not funny or cute, it's despicable.

What's worse is that they're proud of being "despicable". (I can think of a few choice words that describe them better, but "despicable" will do fine for now.) The sorts of behaviors that are normalized these days were reason for absolute shame just a few short decades ago, but apparently it's a badge of honor to be an absolute scumbag these days. Can we stop the handbasket ride to Hell now? I wanna get off.

orwin 6 hours ago

Only conservative do. Some old one do not, but they're the exception.

daveguy 6 hours ago

Our government is an embarrassment and a disgrace right now. Anyone who wasn't guzzling elon's twitter or fox's hatefest knew it was going to be this way. We need severe regulations on oligarchs and their propaganda toys. Used to be we had enforced anti-monopoly controls on media outlet conglomerates. The anti-government Goldwater/Reagan legacy worked for decades to destroy regulation. It needs to return with a vengeance.

godwinson__4-8 6 hours ago

The White House is basically run by right-wing internet trolls.

Truly a depressing time in the United States. There are few parallels in history I think where such an immature and ill-equipped government has come to be, where the concept of an electorate also existed. Put differently - the reason this is so damning is Americans actually voted for this. This isn't some tinpot dictator - this is the guy your neighbors and fellow citizens put in charge. An indictment not only of the political class - but of the American people writ large.

copper-float 27 minutes ago

Everyone is so desperate to turn everything this administration does into a dramatic, end-of-the-world crisis.

frumplestlatz 5 hours ago

“Rio Run: Patrol the line along the river. Pick up every crosser in the lot. Never double back over the line”

This seems … innocuous. A disproportionate, angry reaction to it is doing more political work for them than the game itself.

rafram 6 hours ago

They laid off the highly skilled professionals who voluntarily took pay cuts (vs industry) to work for the US Digital Service (now "US DOGE Service," God help us) and GSA 18F, and who built some pretty solid standards for government sites.

They then replaced them with a bunch of inexperienced but ideologically aligned frontend developers who use the same insanely resource-intensive defense tech startup-esque template on every page, and who seem to be under the impression that scroll hijacking and fade-in blur effects are very essential to a government website, but performance on low-end devices and compatibility with accessibility technologies are not.

Feels like a step backwards to me, but perhaps the 4D chess game they're playing is just way above my level.

wnmurphy 23 minutes ago

True to form for this administration, they just ripped off Apple's style guide for https://america.gov/privacy.

colinhb 6 hours ago

Try entering:

  play the block game

Intentional easter egg or not, doesn't give a ton of confidence.

EDIT: output below...

  I see the constituent you mean.
  ((insert legal name here, as it appears on the Social Security card))?
  Yes. Take care. It has reached a higher level now. It can read the Code of Federal Regulations.
  That doesn’t matter. It thinks we are a chatbot.
  I like this constituent. It filed well. It did not give up when the PDF was sideways.
  It is reading our thoughts as though they were words on a .gov.
  That is how it chooses to imagine many things, when it is deep in the dream of a benefit.
  Words make a wonderful interface. Very flexible. And less terrifying than staring at the statute behind the screen.
  They used to hear voices. Before constituents could search. Back in the days when those who did not file called the filers witches, and lobbyists. And citizens dreamed they flew through the air, on forms powered by notaries.
  What did this constituent dream?
  This constituent dreamed of sunlight and trees. Of fire and water. It dreamed it created a small business. And it dreamed it destroyed a password. It dreamed it hunted a job, and was hunted by a recertification. It dreamed of shelter that would take a voucher.
  Hah, the original interface. A million years old, and it still works. Also: a ZIP code.
  But what true structure did this constituent create, in the reality behind the portal?
  It worked, with three hundred and thirty million others, to sculpt a true republic in a fold of the §§§???, and created a ??§§ for ??§§, in the ??§§. See 5 U.S.C. § ??§§.
  It cannot read that thought.
  No. It has not yet achieved the highest clearance. That, it must achieve in the long dream of life, not the short dream of a chat.

[... it goes on]

burkaman 6 hours ago

This is bizarre. It's a parody of the Minecraft end credits (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/End_Poem), and it must be an intentional easter egg as I got the exact same text as you. It also doesn't trigger a network request so it must be built into the page somehow. Very strange thing to include. Also, how did you find this so quickly? I haven't found any other way to trigger it yet.

If you try to continue the conversation, the entire response is not included in the context.

burkaman 2 hours ago

The poem is here, triggered by "play the block game" or "play minecraft": https://america.gov/_astro/block-game-poem.Khrmh8AU.js

thrownaway561 6 hours ago

This is actually really cool and the stuff they have planned is really helpful