Report: Kushner moving forward with efforts to modernize gov IT, seeks help from Apple & others

Several reports in the past have highlighted the Trump administration’s efforts to modernize the government and now that work is moving forward. As detailed in a new report from Recode, Jared Kushner announced the new efforts to Trump and a group of major tech companies today, including Apple…

According to Kushner, the White House will be forming “small centers of excellence,” which are teams focused on reducing regulation and embracing cloud computing. The teams will also work to make more of their data available for private-sector use.

Apple, Amazon, Oracle, and Qualcomm are among the companies Kushner’s “Office of American Innovation” have reached out to for help with its efforts. Kushner hopes that leading tech engineers will do “tours of duty” for the U.S. government, during which they will advise officials on digital challenges:

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.

On the call today, Kushner and Trump spoke with officials from Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, Intel, Mastercard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. Some executives, such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, have specific needs in mind. For instance, Bezos wants the government to make it easier for companies to sell off-the-shelf technologies to the feds, such as Amazon Web Services.

As part of Kushner’s efforts, Reed Cordish, one of Trump’s top tech aides, says the White House will continue to increase computer science education. This is an area that Tim Cook has worked personally towards, preaching often that learning to code should be a requirement in public education.

Trump held a roundtable earlier this year with notable tech leaders such as Tim Cook to discuss ways to modernize the government. Kushner is heading up these efforts as part of is Office of American Innovation and Cook has personally met with Kushner before.

Recode’s report makes it clear that Kushner’s efforts are in the earlier stages and there’s no timetable for a lot of the goals, but today’s call with tech leaders is the first step towards improvements.