Transitioning a Federal Site for New Administration
The change of Presidential administrations triggers an immense overhaul of federal website content. Incoming administrations are motivated to demonstrate their leadership and legitimacy through swift updates that show they are in control and actively making changes. The changes signal that the transition of power is effective, and that government functions are aligned with the new leadership.
Our CX Team’s Role
Our WebFirst teams have undergone federal website transitions through multiple administrations. During these times, our CX team plays a critical role in partnership with our development team; and our content strategists lead ROT analysis efforts. Ultimately, our content strategists and interaction designers ensure the site’s content aligns with the new administration’s policies, priorities and values while ensuring the website’s wayfinding structures and service capabilities are kept intact.
Rapid Updating Serves the Public
For the American public, the updates to federal sites are critical:
- For Clarity – These sites and their agencies are the primary sources for official policies and programs. Un-aligned content can cause confusion.
- For Compliance – Changes in law, Executive Orders and agency guidelines require immediate updates to avoid misinformation.
- For Relevance – Policy reversals that render content obsolete must to be removed to prevent misleading the public.
- For Direction – Changes to federal programs can mean that content has new associations with new priorities. Users need to be redirected to the initiatives and services that have moved or have replaced former programs.
Sweeping Changes
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) website is an example of a federal site with substantial transition-triggered changes. The HHS site underwent significant modifications due to the Trump’s administration’s shifts towards healthcare policy. The site was revised to reflect the new administration’s stance on healthcare. In support of the updated policies, the site’s information required updating of references to policy messaging related to social, environmental, health, and accessibility issues.
Rapid Response Process
Our content team members had only 1-2 weeks to analyze and update content; nearly 8,000 pages of content in advance of the 2025 inauguration.
In this short time, we took the following steps:
- Reviewed the list of all URL’s on the site that included target terms and any past agency leadership. This data set included publishing dates, content type information, and the terms listed per page.
- Cross referenced against a set of filters including the National Archives and Records Administration Records Schedule, compliance with legal orders, and any pending lawsuits.
- Evaluation of Drupal content types to scrub the site of leadership, staffing, news, blog posts, and announcements.
- Manually categorized pages as “Update and Archive”; “Unpublish and Archive”; or “Keep as is.”
- Wrote recommendations for replacement or updated content.
We prioritized the manual review and categorization of content, starting with removal of elected officials, then removal of inactive or discontinued programs, and, finally, review of targeted terms. The combined internal WebFirst and federal teams prioritized the site page content reviews and updates. First updates were made to remove prior administration elected officials. Next, pages with programs that were no longer supported were taken down, along with news, blog posts, and announcements. And, finally, the team reviewed pages with flagged terms to rewrite.
In our first two weeks focusing on the ROT, our team’s content strategists completed ~60% of the analysis and categorization of content. By the end of week three, we had completed 75%. And, as of February 2025, we continue our engagement with the site.
Efficiencies via CX Experience
Our team’s prior experiences supporting federal sites during transition times, along with our deep subject matter expertise in healthcare, enabled us to meet the aggressive 2025 transition timelines. Many entries/pages provided by analytics reports did not adequately reflect the correct content types. Despite missing or inaccurate data, our team members could quickly evaluate the subject matter and determine to keep, remove, or update each page’s content.
Our familiarity with the Healthcare agency’s mission and site structure positioned us well to provide content revision rewrites and recommendations. Our team’s deep knowledge of the site’s content enabled us to recommend updated navigation labels and appropriately re-align pages and/or content sections as required. And our institutional knowledge of the agency site helped us to advise against the removal of committee documents that were legally required to be kept for up to 15 years. As this specific content contained the terms that were flagged by the analytics reports to be scrubbed, the pages may have been unpublished and archived without our thorough content analysis.
Most importantly, our comprehensive knowledge of and history with the agency’s site enabled our team to rewrite content to remove targeted, unsupported terms, while retaining the site’s ability to serve the public as designed.