In Pics: US President Donald Trump Meets Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Other Tech CEOs to Discuss Government Overhaul

President Donald Trump met with the heads of 18 US technology companies including Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp on Monday, seeking their help in streamlining government computer systems.

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

"Our goal is to drive a radical transformation of federal government technology that will provide dramatically better services for citizens," Trump said. "The government needs to catch up with the technological revolution."

Executives are part of the so-called American Technology Council that Trump formed in May to support the US government's modernization efforts.

"The United States must have the most modern government in the world today - it does not," said Apple chief executive Tim Cook

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

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

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

He said the administration was eliminating unnecessary regulations for government computer systems as a rule to prevent Y2K problems. Most of the government's 6,100 data centers can be consolidated and moved to a cloud-based storage system.

The White House is trying to reduce government, reduce federal labor force and eliminate regulations.

Trump signed an order in March to reform the federal government and took advantage of Kushner to lead a White House Office of American Innovation to take advantage of business ideas and potentially privatize some government functions.

Many technology executives are eager to get help from the White House to address regulatory issues and other policy issues, such as visas for highly skilled workers.

Other speakers included Alphabet Inc CEO Eric Schmidt, president of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, John Doerr, and CEOs of Microsoft Corporation, Intel Corp, Qualcomm Inc. and Oracle Systems. Not attending because of a conflict, the company said.

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

VISA PROGRAM

The CEOs and the White House also planned to discuss Trump's review, announced in April of the US visa program to bring highly skilled foreign workers into the country. Cook plans to increase immigration, an informed person said on Sunday.

The council also seeks to increase the security of US government IT systems and wants to learn from private sector practices. By 2015, hackers exposed the personal information of 22 million people in the United States government databases.

The White House thinks it can learn from credit card companies about the significant reduction of fraud. A government audit of 2016 found that in Medicaid there was only $ 29 billion in fraud in a single year.

Following Trump's June 1 decision to withdraw from the Paris climate deals, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Walt Disney CEO Robert Iger resigned from the White House advisory panels. White House officials said the dispute had little impact and they had to reject the technology leaders of Monday's event due to lack of space.