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“Tim Cook, Eric Schmidt, Jeff Bezos Praise Trump Admin After White House Tech Meeting,” Breitbart News’ Charlie Spiering reports.
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The executives were at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave for the inaugural meeting of the American Technology Council, which is being personally led by the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who declared at the start of the day’s meeting, “Together we will unleash the creativity of the private sector to provide citizen services in a way that has never happened before. We will foster a new set of start-ups focused on gov-tech and be a global leader in the field making government more transparent and responsive to citizens’ needs,” Ali Breland reports for The Hill.
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“I’m absolutely convinced that during your administration there is going to be a huge explosion of new opportunities because of the platforms that are getting built in our industry, those will create huge, very large new business opportunities for which we entrepreneurs, technical talent, immigration and so forth which you understand, it can drive America very very positively forward and it’s going to happen soon during your leadership,” Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Alphabet, babbled to Trump during the tail end of the meeting.
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“Your administration is doing very well,” tech investor Peter Thiel told Trump at the meeting, Cecilia Kang reports for Politico. Thiel’s former chief of staff, Michael Kratsios, is the White House deputy chief technology officer.
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“By collaborating with Trump, in spite of his backward-looking climate action and dangerous Muslim travel ban, Apple’s Tim Cook, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and other participating tech leaders are making a clear statement that their bottom line is more important than our communities and planet,” said Nicole Carty, a campaigner for SumOfUs, an advocacy group pressuring executives to leave Trump’s advisory councils, told Nancy Scola and Steven Overly of Politico. “Trump’s invitation to the White House and American Technology Council was a test, and these tech CEOs failed.”
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It’s interesting to contrast the decision by many leaders in the tech world to participate in Trump’s American Technology Council with the choice by six leaders of the HIV/AIDS-fighting community to resign from the Presidential Advisory Council of HIV/AIDS last week. As Scott Scheottes, one of the six, writes for Newsweek, “we cannot ignore the many signs that the Trump Administration does not take the on-going epidemic or the needs of people living with HIV seriously.” He notes that the Office of National AIDS Policy website was taken down the day of Trump’s inauguration and has not been replaced, nor has the president appointed anyone to lead the White House Office of National AIDS Policy.
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It is not known if anyone in the room gagged or hissed when Kushner referred to being a global leader in government transparency and responsiveness or sought to mention the current process by which Senate Republicans are ramming through a new health care law that will take billions from needy citizens to cut taxes on the rich, without open hearings. As Philip Rucker and Ed O’Keefe detail for The Washington Post, “more and more in the Trump era, business in Washington is happening behind closed doors.”
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“I see a bureaucracy that doesn’t want documents and the truth out the door…and just flipping the middle finger at Congress,” outgoing Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), who was the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform until announcing his departure from Congress, told the Post.
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Here’s one nice new example of what the Trump administration policy-making process is actually like: a new executive order being drafted to address drug pricing is being worked on by Joe Grogan, OMB’s director of health programs, who was previously the top lobbyist for Gilead Sciences, a drug company that made headlines in 2013 for setting a new hepatitis treatment at more than $80,000, as Sarah Karlin-Smith reports for Politico.
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Opposition watch: The most expensive Congressional race in history ends tonight in Georgia, and as Michelle Goldberg reports for Slate, the result in the Jon Ossoff-Karen Handel matchup could come down to whether Democratic canvassers figured out how to reach liberal-leaning young people through social networking, since their more conservative parents aren’t taking kindly to door-knocking canvassers seeking to talk to their kids.
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From preschool and soccer fields to political activism, the path of suburban Democratic women energized by Trump’s election is being put to the test in the Georgia race, Joan Walsh reports for The Nation.
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Paving the same lane, Rebecca Traister reports in New York magazine, “The sheer amount of time they are devoting to political organizing is staggering, especially given that most of them work full time and have children.”
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Indivisible Austin has launched ProtectOurCare.us, a new site designed to collect and share video testimonials about how they stand to be affected by the repeal of Obamacare.
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Indivisible national is crowdsourcing amendments to the Senate health care bill to give Democrats fodder for their effort to stall a vote.
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Privacy, shmivacy: Data on 198 million American voters was left on an open Amazon server by Deep Root Analytics, a Republican data firm, until cyber risk analyst Chris Vickery publicized the disclosure, Dell Cameron and Kate Conger report for Gizmodo. The firm’s founder Alex Lundry says the breach was accidental.
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