Airbnb founder Joe Gebbia says DOGE is pushing to create an ‘Apple-Store like experience’ in government
- DOGE employee Joe Gebbia, a cofounder of Airbnb and recent convert to the Republican cause, wants to reimagine how federal workers retire, a process currently conducted entirely on paper. In an ideal world, Gebbia said, applying for retirement as a fed would be a seamless, “Apple-Store-like” experience that would take just a few days. An overhaul is coming within months, he told Fox News.
Joe Gebbia, one of the founders of short-term rental site Airbnb and a member of the cost-cutting team of federal workers known as DOGE, has a positively technocratic vision for overhauling how government workers retire.
Gebbia wants to change the retirement process from its current paper-based system to “an online digital process that will take a few days at most.”
“We really believe the government can be an Apple-store-like experience,” Gebbia said in an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier on Thursday.
Gebbia appeared with friend and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, along with six other members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), in a largely friendly wide-ranging interview to describe the team’s cost-cutting efforts. (Amy Gleason, who the government says is the acting administrator of DOGE, did not appear and was not mentioned by the DOGE team.)
Gebbia said he got involved with the effort when he “bumped into Anthony [Armstrong, a Morgan Stanley banker and fellow DOGE staffer] and Elon probably back in February and they told me something about a mine that dealt with retirement. I love the challenge so I jumped on board,” Gebbia said.
The process to retire a federal employee involves going into personnel files stored deep in a limestone mine in western Pennsylvania, Gebbia said. The cave contains over 28,000 filing cabinets and over 200 workers who are relegated to their quarters—not because of secrecy, but for space, The New York Times wrote last month.
The system is entirely paper-based, and it currently takes as long to process one worker’s paperwork as it did back in the 1970s: about two months, according to the Times.
“There’s little doubt the mine is a paragon of inefficiency,” the Times wrote.
That means, according to Gebbia, the federal government can process only about 8,000 retirements per month, which became a roadblock for DOGE when it offered early retirement buyouts to hundreds of thousands of workers.
“Probably in the next few months we’ll do an overhaul,” Gebbia said.
“It’s an interesting problem,” he said later in the interview. “We can use design to solve it and good engineering and create a better experience for everybody.”
Gebbia revealed his involvement with DOGE a month ago in a post on X, the Elon Musk-owned social-media platform, where he invited others to join him “to help design beautiful, user-friendly digital products.” Gebbia reposted an announcement from the Office of Personnel Management that it had processed a federal worker’s retirement entirely digitally for the first time.
A longtime Democratic donor, Gebbia has said he voted Republican in the 2024 election and voiced his support for current Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Gebbia’s revelation prompted a flood of negative comments on Airbnb’s forums, following which the platform distanced itself from its founder, saying in a statement that "Joe is joining DOGE in his personal capacity.” While Gebbia remains an Airbnb board member, he “has not had an operating role at the company since July 2022, and his personal views don't reflect the views of Airbnb or Airbnb.org," the company said.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
