WASHINGTON - US President Donald Trump met on Monday with the heads of 18 US technology companies, including Apple Inc, Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp, seeking their help to make the government's computing systems more efficient.

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

"Our goal is to lead a sweeping transformation of the federal government's technology that will deliver dramatically better services for citizens," Trump said. "Government needs to catch up with the technology revolution."

The executives are part of the so-called American Technology Council that Trump formed in May to support efforts to modernize the US government.

"The US should have the most modern government in the world. Today it doesn't," Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said.

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

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

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

He said the administration was scrapping unneeded regulations for government computing systems, such as a rule on preventing Y2K issues. Most of the government's 6,100 data centers can be consolidated and moved to a cloud-based storage system.

The White House is seeking to shrink government, reduce the federal workforce and eliminate regulations.

Trump in March signed an order to overhaul the federal government and tapped Kushner to lead a White House Office of American Innovation to leverage business ideas and potentially privatize some government functions.

Others attending included Alphabet Inc Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Chairman John Doerr and the CEOs of Microsoft Corp IBM Corp, Intel Corp , Qualcomm Inc, Oracle Corp and Adobe Systems Inc.

Reuters

(China Daily USA 06/20/2017 page2)