All in the Family

The White House is announcing the morning the formation of its Office of American Innovation, which will be led by Jared Kushner, the president’s eminently qualified son-in-law, report Ashley Parker and Philip Rucker for The Washington Post. Kushner—who already holds the job of bringing peace to the Middle East and managing his father-in-laws many other foreign policy initiatives—envisions reimagining Veterans Affairs, modernizing the tech infrastructure of every government agency, and providing broadband to every American as part of Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure plans.

The government should be run like a great American company,” Kushner told the Post. Apparently the kind of company he means is an incestuous family business. For example, Reed Cordish, a Kushner deputy whose title is assistant to the president for intergovernmental and technology initiatives, is a longtime friend of the Trump family who is a Baltimore real-estate developer. The families hooked up as a result of Trump suing Cordish’s father and then “falling in love” with him upon meeting, according John Fritze’s report in the Baltimore Sun. He also reports that “Ivanka Trump helped facilitate Reed Cordish’s first date with her best friend. The two eventually married.”

Public service announcement: Here’s why government can’t be “run like a business”: As Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Boston’s CIO, said at the Code for America summit in 2015, “Businesses get to choose their customers, government has to serve everyone.” (Bonus link: how teachers make this point better than anyone.)

According to the Post report, the office is working with tech executives including Apple’s Tim Cook, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, and Tesla’s Elon Musk. Benioff told the Post that while “we don’t agree on everything” he is “hopeful that Jared will be collaborative with our industry in moving this forward. When I talk to him, he does remind me of a lot of the young, scrappy entrepreneurs that I invest in in their 30s.” OK, that comment made me throw up in my mouth a little bit.

Putting lipstick on pigs: Kushner’s explicit elevation to White House tech and innovation czar presents our friends in places like the White House Digital Service, 18F, and all the other department and agency digital services with the dilemma they’ve been hoping to avoid: Can you keep your head down and work on modernizing government services if that means legimitizing Trump and Kushner’s flagrant disregard for clean government?

To your health (care)! As the dust settles on the collapse of the Republican drive to repeal Obamacare, here are some nuggets that have emerged: On Thursday, the day before the American Health Care Act was pulled from the House floor, the top post on the Cloakroom app, a chat tool used solely by denizens of Capital Hill, was “We are all interns today,” Phillip Bump reported for The Washington Post. That’s because everyone on the Hill was answering the “godforsaken phones” that were ringing all day. One Republican member of Congress, Daniel Donovan of NY, reported that calls to his office were running 1000-1 in opposition to the bill.

The opposition to the repeal of Obamacare, reports David Weigel of The Washington Post, wasn’t led by congressional Democrats, but instead came from a “roiling, well-organized ‘resistance’ [that] bombarded Republicans with calls and filled their town halls with skeptics.” He highlights the role of Bernie Sanders calling early rallies to defend the ACA as well as the rise of Indivisible.

With the House likely to follow the Senate in voting to let Internet service providers sell their customers’ usage data, the battle for online consumer privacy is likely to shift to state legislatures, Conor Dougherty reports for The New York Times.

What sharing economy? Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and a bunch of senior employees went to a karaoke/escort bar in Seoul in 2014, resulting in an HR complaint from one of the female employees Amir Efrati reports for The Information.

According to BuzzFeed’s Priya Anand, some Uber employees are “frustrated” by board member Arianna Huffington’s role in overseeing the company’s internal investigation into allegations of systemic sexism at the ride-hail giant. Anand also reports that Huffington’s Thrive Global health and wellness company used to sell a t-shirt emblazoned “#SLEEPYOURWAYTOTHETOP,” until Uber employees complained.

This is civic tech: Civicist contributor An Xiao Mina elaborates on her recent piece about networked production and protest culture in a talk at the Berkman Klein Center.

A Stanford University demographer, Timnit Gebru, has figured out how to use Google Street View images to reveal detailed information about Americans’ race, income, education level and occupation—even their voting preferences, reports MIT’s Technology Review.

Your moment of zen: This “life-affirming” video from Kirsten Lepore is just strange enough to actually work, butt for one odd feature. You’ll see.