Poll of the Day > Trump is seeking to modernize government technology and tech infrastructure.

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-tech-idUSKBN19A16Q

President Donald Trump met on Monday with the heads of 18 U.S. technology companies including Apple Inc (AAPL.O), Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) and Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O), seeking their help to make the government's computing systems more efficient.

The White House wants to update government information technology systems, cut costs, eliminate waste and improve service. Trump on Monday cited estimates that the government could save up to $1 trillion over 10 years through such measures.

"Our goal is to lead a sweeping transformation of the federal government’s technology that will deliver dramatically better services for citizens," Trump said. "Government needs to catch up with the technology revolution."

The executives are part of the so-called American Technology Council that Trump formed in May to support efforts to modernize the U.S. government.

“The U.S. should have the most modern government in the world. Today it doesn’t,” Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said

Amazon Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos said he wanted the Trump administration to make use of commercially available technologies, worker retraining, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Before meeting with Trump, the CEOs met in 10 small group sessions with Vice President Mike Pence, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, along with the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ohio State University.

Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and adviser, said the administration wanted to "unleash the creativity of the private sector to provide citizen services in a way that has never happened before."

He said the administration was scrapping unneeded regulations for government computing systems, such as a rule on preventing Y2K issues. Most of the government's 6,100 data centers can be consolidated and moved to a cloud-based storage system.

The White House is seeking to shrink government, reduce the federal workforce and eliminate regulations.

Trump in March signed an order to overhaul the federal government and tapped Kushner to lead a White House Office of American Innovation to leverage business ideas and potentially privatize some government functions.

Many of the tech executives are eager to get White House help in dealing with regulatory and other policy issues such as visas for highly skilled workers.

Others attending include Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Chairman John Doerr and the CEOs of Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) International Business Machines Corp (IBM.N), Intel Corp (INTC.O), Qualcomm Inc (QCOM.O), Oracle Corp (ORCL.N) and Adobe Systems Inc (ADBE.O). Facebook (FB.O) CEO Mark Zuckerberg was invited but could not attend because of a conflict, the company said.

A 2016 U.S. Government Accountability Office report estimated the U.S. government spent more than $80 billion in IT annually, excluding classified operations. In 2015, the U.S. government made at least 7,000 separate IT investments and some agencies were using systems that had components at least 50 years old. "This structure is unsustainable," Kushner said.

The CEOs and White House also planned to discuss Trump's review announced in April of the U.S. visa program for bringing high-skilled foreign workers into the country. Cook plans to raise immigration, a person briefed on the matter said Sunday.

The council also seeks to boost the security of U.S. government IT systems and wants to learn from private-sector practices. In 2015, hackers exposed the personal information of 22 million people from U.S. government databases.

The White House thinks it can learn from credit card companies about significantly reducing fraud. A 2016 government audit found that in Medicaid alone there was $29 billion in fraud in a single year.

Following Trump's June 1 decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accords, Tesla (TSLA.O) CEO Elon Musk and Walt Disney (DIS.N) CEO Robert Iger stepped down from White House advisory panels. White House officials said the dispute had little impact and that they had to turn away tech leaders from Monday's event because of lack of space.

In any case, I applaud him for doing this. Heaven knows the country needs it.

However, it's going to take an act of God to get this done and done well.

Makes sense, I suppose. Granted, I expect there'll be a lot of issues in getting everything finished -- since it's a massive untertaking -- for which the administration will be crucified.
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Let's hope they use passwords
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Doctor Foxx posted...

Let's hope they use passwords

And not passwords like "Trump123" or "AmericaRock$".

Putin must be really excited about this
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Wow are they really that advanced?
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WastelandCowboy posted...

Doctor Foxx posted...

Let's hope they use passwords

And not passwords like "Trump123" or "AmericaRock$".

What about HUUUUUUUUUGGGGE ?
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If it's like any other incompetent organization, there's "mission critical" something or other that's only accessible through IE6 on Windows XP. Then again, it's the federal government, so that "mission critical" whatever is probably written in COBOL on a system from the late 50s.

I'll bet they make the password be "1-2-3-4-5"...
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Questionmarktarius posted...

If it's like any other incompetent organization, there's "mission critical" something or other that's only accessible through IE6 on Windows XP. Then again, it's the federal government, so that "mission critical" whatever is probably written in COBOL on a system from the late 50s.

I remember seeing a report that our nuclear codes are stored on computers from the 60's, which surprisingly makes them super secure since you can't actually access them without a telnet enabled computer.
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Dikitain posted...

Questionmarktarius posted...

If it's like any other incompetent organization, there's "mission critical" something or other that's only accessible through IE6 on Windows XP. Then again, it's the federal government, so that "mission critical" whatever is probably written in COBOL on a system from the late 50s.

I remember seeing a report that our nuclear codes are stored on computers from the 60's, which surprisingly makes them super secure since you can't actually access them without a telnet enabled computer.

Security through ports and cables that haven't existed for decades!
http://www.retrotechnology.com/aux/pppl_3row.jpg

That's rich coming from someone who leaked information directly to the Russians.

see, its like every halfway decent thing trump does or at least wants to do I go "okay, cool, hope it works"

rather than "i hope it fails so his presidency looks even worse"

like i can work with the guy when he stops being a moron.

argonautweakend posted...

see, its like every halfway decent thing trump does or at least wants to do I go "okay, cool, hope it works"

rather than "i hope it fails so his presidency looks even worse"

like i can work with the guy when he stops being a moron.

"You can't fix stupid." -Ron White
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Dikitain posted...

I remember seeing a report that our nuclear codes are stored on computers from the 60's, which surprisingly makes them super secure since you can't actually access them without a telnet enabled computer.

MUDs use telnet, they're playable on Windows 10, it's not secure.

I was happy with this until I saw:

WastelandCowboy posted...

Trump in March signed an order to overhaul the federal government and tapped Kushner to lead a White House Office of American Innovation to leverage business ideas and potentially privatize some government functions.

That cannot end well.
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Hey guys, let's outsource the Pentagon's IT department. Surely nothing bad would happen!

TyVulpine posted...

I'll bet they make the password be "1-2-3-4-5"...

I've got the same combination on my luggage!
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I approve of the idea.

I don't believe a man who may potentially be the dumbest human to ever be president and insists on only making wrong decisions is going to make the right decisions to get this implemented well.

Lulz!

This from the president who complained that you'd need to be Einstein to figure out how the Navy's new electromagnetic catapults work and said they should go back to "god damned steam!"
Yeah, now he cares about modernization of government tech? Hah!

While the few horror stories where they still use XP or DOS 3.11 or whatever certainly need an upgrade, most government agencies probably have servicable computing already, this sounds like a huge waste of money, and the cited estimated long term savings made me laugh out loud.
"$1 trillion over 10 years," HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Moving to cloud-based storage seems like a particularly dumb idea, too, considering how much of government data is classified or sensitive / PII. Not to mention it was only a few years ago OPM got hacked and the personal data of literally over 20 million past/present employees and applicants was stolen, and not long before that a private company that did background checks was also hacked and had all that sensitive data stolen, too.

When it comes to government data, sometimes making it more difficult to access is a GOOD thing, and we should be wary of taking down the various barriers to it when foreign governments are constantly trying to steal it.

Dikitain posted...

Questionmarktarius posted...

If it's like any other incompetent organization, there's "mission critical" something or other that's only accessible through IE6 on Windows XP. Then again, it's the federal government, so that "mission critical" whatever is probably written in COBOL on a system from the late 50s.

I remember seeing a report that our nuclear codes are stored on computers from the 60's, which surprisingly makes them super secure since you can't actually access them without a telnet enabled computer.

Yeah, it's delightfully ironic.

Blitzoff1987 posted...

That's rich coming from someone who leaked information directly to the Russians.

What? Bizarre nonsequitur plus wrong-headed claim.

BlackScythe0 posted...

I approve of the idea.

I don't believe a man who may potentially be the dumbest human to ever be president and insists on only making wrong decisions is going to make the right decisions to get this implemented well.

You're aware that Trump isn't personally handling the implementation any more than Obama, GWB, Clinton, etc, would have been, right?

streamofthesky posted...

Lulz!

This from the president who complained that you'd need to be Einstein to figure out how the Navy's new electromagnetic catapults work and said they should go back to "god damned steam!"
Yeah, now he cares about modernization of government tech? Hah!

While the few horror stories where they still use XP or DOS 3.11 or whatever certainly need an upgrade, most government agencies probably have servicable computing already, this sounds like a huge waste of money, and the cited estimated long term savings made me laugh out loud.
"$1 trillion over 10 years," HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Moving to cloud-based storage seems like a particularly dumb idea, too, considering how much of government data is classified or sensitive / PII. Not to mention it was only a few years ago OPM got hacked and the personal data of literally over 20 million past/present employees and applicants was stolen, and not long before that a private company that did background checks was also hacked and had all that sensitive data stolen, too.

When it comes to government data, sometimes making it more difficult to access is a GOOD thing, and we should be wary of taking down the various barriers to it when foreign governments are constantly trying to steal it.

Keep in mind that many government agencies still rely heavily on paper records so the status quo isn't really "serviceable."
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Is his idea of modernization to switch over to steam rather than use digital?
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Zeus posted...

BlackScythe0 posted...

I approve of the idea.

I don't believe a man who may potentially be the dumbest human to ever be president and insists on only making wrong decisions is going to make the right decisions to get this implemented well.

You're aware that Trump isn't personally handling the implementation any more than Obama, GWB, Clinton, etc, would have been, right?

You're aware that for this to be done there needs to be plans made, usually more than one, sifting through the bids for the job.

That orange sack of shit isn't going to care what the best plan is, just who sucks up to him and bribes him the most.

It's a good idea, though I have my doubts he'll actually be able to pull it off.
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BlackScythe0 posted...

Zeus posted...

BlackScythe0 posted...

I approve of the idea.

I don't believe a man who may potentially be the dumbest human to ever be president and insists on only making wrong decisions is going to make the right decisions to get this implemented well.

You're aware that Trump isn't personally handling the implementation any more than Obama, GWB, Clinton, etc, would have been, right?

You're aware that for this to be done there needs to be plans made, usually more than one, sifting through the bids for the job.

That orange sack of shit isn't going to care what the best plan is, just who sucks up to him and bribes him the most.

You're aware that such plans are usually handled by people OTHER than the president, right? By the time it reaches the president, it's mostly a matter of him okaying things.
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