Posted on 06/19/2017 6:52:07 AM PDT by Enlightened1
Apple CEO Tim Cook and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos will be among the business leaders at the White House on Monday as the internal think tank led by President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner begins the long process of modernizing the government’s information technology systems.
The Trump administration will shift its focus to the tech sector this week as part of an ongoing effort to keep its policy ambitions on the front-burner.
Over the past two weeks, the administration’s focus on infrastructure and workforce development were swamped by former FBI director James Comey’s testimony before the Senate and the battle lines drawn between the White House and the special counsel overseeing a broad investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
On Monday, the Office of American Innovation, a Kushner-led group inside the West Wing, will conduct the first of many brainstorming sessions with about 18 CEOs and two-dozen more business experts. The White House also plans to unveil a new technology council.
Trump and Vice President Pence will swing by the working sessions on Monday. Kushner, his wife Ivanka Trump and most of Trump’s senior aides and advisers will participate.
So too will Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney.
The presence of Cook and Bezos could make for some interesting dynamics.
Last year, Trump called for a boycott of Apple products after the company refused to help federal authorities hack an iPhone used by one of the shooters in the San Bernardino terror attacks. Trump also has a running feud with the Bezos-owned Washington Post.
Among the other CEOs who will be present: Ajay Banga of MasterCard, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Ginni Rometty of IBM, Brian Krzanich of Intel...
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
A “Who’s Who” of H-1B abusers.
GOOG, AMZN are Wall St. creations that have grown so large as a result of Wall St. concentration, that to feed their margins, they have taken hundreds of millions of dollars in spook contracts thereby making them symbiotic to the Clinton/Obama networks. They abhor republicans, conservatism, and Trump.
Kushner has thousands upon thousands of well-qualified conservatives to choose from in laying out programs for workforce infrastructure and facilitation. But he will allow the liberal mindset to occupy these activities. Conservatives will be squelched.
Having conservatives lead the technology efforts allows the interest of Americans to come first, for Veterans to be promoted, for goals to be in furtherance of American exceptionalism without establishing technology beachheads for foreign interests and liberal ideology.
People really have no idea how broken the federal IT system is. It’s not just a matter of buying equipment or upgrading systems. It’s culture. There are tens of thousands of people involved in the federal IT systems who have absolutely no idea how to do this stuff with any skill or efficiency.
Massively hard to fix this. Again, not for any specific technical reasons. But the bureaucrats are just in the way. And the payscales generally guarantee that most of your technical people (not all) will not be the cream of the crop. If you want to pay Sally $80,000 to handle network design, but Wells Fargo wants to offer Sally $150,000, then the government is going to end up hiring Fred and not Sally, and Fred isn’t going to be very good at his job.
I don’t know about other areas of government, but there has been an effort (Pushed by Ashton Carter, I believe) to have DoD try to behave more like Silicon Valley. It’s not a bad idea, and this meeting with Bezos and others seems to lean in this direction. But Acquisition laws, contract structures, and “they way we’ve always done things” really works powerfully against anything like the agile or devops world of Silicon Valley.
I will watch this effort with great interest.
Good! Hopefully Jared will chuck out all the Algore-era crap and cut the bureaucratic BS to virtually zero, so the fed’l gov’t can operate more like a private business.
The Obamacare website was a monstrous disaster for a reason. It’s typical.
“the administration’s focus on infrastructure and workforce development were swamped by former FBI director James Comey’s testimony”
uh, yeah. right. like the white house can do only one thing at a time, and they put their entire governance on hold while Comey testified.
what this statement is REALLY saying is:
“the MEDIA’s focus on infrastructure and workforce development were swamped by former FBI director James Comey’s testimony”
Sorry, but I don’t trust this triumvirate as far as I can throw the three of them tarred and feathered together.
Bezos bears a striking resemblance to Daddy Warbucks of Little Orphan Annie fame.
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