U.S. President Donald Trump may be moving technology further up his list of priorities, signing an executive order creating the American Technology Council, which will include members of his administration along with input from leaders at top tech companies.
The ATC will be charged with transforming government IT, particularly for outward-facing citizen services, the order states:
Americans deserve better digital services from their Government. To effectuate this policy, the Federal Government must transform and modernize its information technology and how it uses and delivers digital services.
Trump will chair the committee, which also includes Vice President Mike Pence and many cabinet members. Its purview will not extend to any national security systems. However, the Director of National Intelligence "is encouraged to provide access to classified information on cybersecurity threats, vulnerabilities, and mitigation procedures to the ATC in order to facilitate the ATC's activities," according to the order.
The ATC will be headed up by Chris Liddell, a Trump aide who once served as CFO of Microsoft. About 20 tech company officials will meet with the group in June, Reuters reported. While none were named, expect IBM, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and other top names to be in the mix.
In some respects, the executive order seems to be putting the proverbial cart before the horse. For one thing, Trump has yet to appoint a new U.S. chief technology officer (although he did name a deputy CTO, Michael Kratsios, an aide to Trump ally Peter Thiel). It's also unclear how much overlap the ATC will have with the Office of American Innovation, which is headed by Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Still, there's no question Trump's administration needs an entity like the ATC, given the enormity of U.S. IT spending and the related ability for the government to not only deliver better citizen services, but also influence the direction of emerging technologies.
Overall, U.S. government agencies spent $82 billion on IT during fiscal 2017, according to the IT Dashboard website. That doesn't include money in the IT modernization fund (which may not end up included in the new budget), or spending on classified IT projects.
Three-quarters or so of government IT spending is on maintaining and operating existing systems, rather than new innovation. Compounding the problem, government IT projects routinely end up well over budget and schedule and lawmakers have railed against the perception of rampant waste for decades, to little avail.
The ATC might also benefit by setting somewhat less lofty goals, as it will be next to impossible to truly "transform and modernize" the government's IT landscape during Trump's term.
A case in point: The Internal Revenue Service's Individual Master File application, which handles tax information and refunds, is written in assembler language and is nearly 60 years old. Or how about this one: The country's nuclear weapons system runs on a system that uses floppy disks and a 1970s-era IBM mainframe. (An upgrade is scheduled for completion this year.)
Former president Barack Obama's administration made some strides in improving citizen IT services, particularly in areas such as information transparency through the IT Dashboard, Data.gov and other avenues. But the colossal initial failure of Healthcare.gov showed that the U.S. government all too often cannot deliver major IT projects succesfully—not even the website underpinning the signature policy achievement of Obama's two terms in office. The ATC has its work cut out for it.
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