Kicking off Tech Week, Jared Kushner pushes to modernize government systems

Jared Kushner might be singlehandedly tasked with securing peace in the Middle East among other totally reasonable assignments from his father-in-law, but today he basked in the warm glow of his favorite private sector heroes. At a White House tech summit that lured Silicon Valley’s most powerful and obsequious, Kushner made a rare public speaking appearance to mostly say some unobjectionable stuff about modernizing government tech, a topic surely in the front of every American’s mind.

“Today we’ve assembled a very impressive group of leaders from the private sector and are putting them to work here today to work on some of the country’s biggest challenges that will make a very meaningful difference to a lot of its citizens,” Kushner said, kicking off the White House’s Technology Week, which will include more tech policy meetings as the week goes on.

“The Department of Defense for example still uses 8″ floppy discs on some of its legacy systems,” Kushner said. He went on to decry the 1980 Paperwork Reduction Act and declare the VA’s electronic systems overdue for an update. He also stated that federal agencies operate 6,100 data centers which could be consolidated and migrated to the cloud, though did not offer any immediate specifics about what that process would or what security measures would be put in place.

Hear Jared Kushner speak in a rare public appearance https://t.co/dISsUmb3aE pic.twitter.com/Q0vNw5NESq

— TIME (@TIME) June 19, 2017

In spite of pressure for the tech community to denounce the Trump administration, the new tech summit’s lineup remains nearly the same as it was back in December, again featuring Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, Satya Nadella and Brian Krzanich, among others. Elon Musk, absent today, famously rage-quit his White House relationship after Trump left the Paris Agreement in early June. And this time around, Facebook didn’t send COO Sheryl Sandberg (apparently due to a scheduling conflict), though noted maybe-vampire and longtime Facebook board horror Peter Thiel was there.

So far, Tech Week is shaping up to be every bit as memorable as Infrastructure Week!