TLDR; By “redesign” I actually mean clusterfuck. As of last Thursday 47% of the 315 whitehouse.gov URLs I’ve collected during 2017 are now 404 Not Found
Dollars to donuts this goes down to switching CMSes from Drupal to WordPress–probably because the tech team doesn’t know Drupal, but also doesn’t know how to remap the URLs or to port over any of the data. I’ll bet it’s down more to incompetence than it is being evil, though being evil may be part of it too.