“The White House has asked the likes of Apple, Amazon, Oracle and Qualcomm to lend some of their digital expertise to Washington, D.C. in the coming months to help the Trump administration rethink the way that federal agencies use technology,” Tony Romm reports for Recode.
“On a private call with those and other major tech companies Thursday, top advisers to the president, including Jared Kushner, announced the White House would be forming small ‘centers of excellence,’ teams focused on reducing regulation while trying to get federal agencies to embrace cloud computing and make more of their data available for private-sector use, according to four sources with knowledge of the matter,” Romm reports. “As part of those centers, Kushner and his aides with the Office of American Innovation asked the tech industry for its help — potentially through a system where leading tech engineers can do brief ‘tours of duty’ advising the U.S. government on some of its digital challenges.”
“The huddle marks the next step for Kushner’s effort to modernize government after Trump convened the chief executives of Apple, Facebook, Google and other Silicon Valley staples at the White House in June,” Romm reports. “Two months later, those leaders’ representatives joined a Thursday call with the White House, as did officials from Apple, Google, IBM, Intel, Mastercard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, sources said.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: In June, Chris Liddell, director of strategic initiatives for the Trump administration, told CNBC that the government has more than 6,000 data centers and spends $86 billion a year on technology, figures that are “orders of magnitude” higher than the private-market equivalents.
The waste is simply appalling. Where is that $86 billion annually going, exactly? And, most importantly, to what lengths will those receiving those billions go in order to keep the appalling spigot flowing?
Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other. — Ronald Reagan
SEE ALSO:
President Trump advisor Kushner: Government must move past floppies, Y2K and ‘unleash the creativity of the private sector’ – June 19, 2017
President Trump to meet with Apple CEO Cook, other tech execs on cutting government waste, improving services – June 19, 2017
Apple CEO Cook, other tech CEOs to attend President Trump’s Jared Kushner-led summit – June 9, 2017