
In a move to improve its services and help in cutting Government waste, President Donald Trump today held a meeting with the chief executives of technology companies including Apple Inc and Amazon.com.
In the meeting with nearly 20 chief executives, the White House pushes to shrink government, cut federal employees and eliminate regulations. The White House claims that they could have saved up to $ 1 trillion in 10 years by cutting expenses on the Government As a consequence of this, many business executives are eager to work with the new administration as they face numerous regulatory and other policy issues.
In May, Trump created an "American Technology Council," the latest in a series of efforts to modernize the U.S. government. He signed a separate order in March to overhaul the federal government and tapped son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner to lead a White House Office of American Innovation to leverage business ideas and potentially privatize some government functions.
Trump asked lawmakers to cut $3.6 trillion in government spending over the next decade. He assured that the healthcare, defence, and food assistance programs were boosted in the budget.
A 2016 US Government Accountability Office report estimated the U.S. government spent more than $80 billion on IT annually, excluding classified operations. In 2015, there were at least 7,000 separate IT investments by the U.S. government and some agencies were using systems that had components at least 50 years old.
The tech CEOs and White House also plan to discuss Trump's review announced in April of the U.S. visa program for bringing high-skilled foreign workers into the country.
The council also seeks to boost the cybersecurity 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.
In a document outlining the working-group sessions, the White House said the federal government should require "making it easy for agencies to use the cloud."
The White House thinks it can take lessons from credit card companies in 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 Chief Executive Elon Musk and Walt Disney 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.