The American Technology Council (ATC) led by President Donald Trump on Monday met with Amazon, Microsoft, and 16 other Silicon Vallery giants to discuss the upcoming modernization of computer systems and related services used by the United States government. The council’s first session was focused on what Trump referred to as “a sweeping transformation” of technological assets employed by the government, with the current U.S. President stating that the ATC will be looking to make the existing infrastructure and services more efficient and might save up to $1 trillion in the next decade. The President didn’t elaborate on that particular figure, though he asserted that the federal government fell behind in terms of technology adoption in recent years and has to remedy that issue in the near future.
Most of the U.S. tech giants that attended the Monday meeting were represented by their top executives, as the session was attended by the likes of Amazon Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos and Apple CEO Tim Cook, both of whom generally supported the idea of modernizing the government’s technological infrastructure and publicly made some suggestions for doing so. Bezos specifically recommended worker retraining and artificial intelligence (AI) applications, while Cook implied that the government must technologically reinvent itself since it’s running the technologically most advanced nation on the planet. No concrete details on Trump administration’s efforts to do so have yet been revealed, though President’s senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner suggested that the private sector will play an important role in the upcoming change, with the government itself likely looking to eliminate what it labels as needless regulations that stifle innovation. The statement paves the way for privatizing a number of federal IT operations, though it remains to be seen how much control is the current administration willing to delegate to the private sector.
Apart from a federal technological overhaul, the ATC is also likely to discuss the government’s immigration policy that was met with significant criticism from the Silicon Valley in recent months, with many tech giants seeing Trump’s now-overturned travel bans and announcements of stricter visa vetting policies as extremely unbeneficial to their operations.