Tag: Policy

Kushner ‘SWAT Team’ Will Target Bureaucracy With Tech Luminaries

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The NewCo Daily: Today’s Top Stories

Ryan Johnson | Wikimedia Commons

Ever since Bill Clinton tapped Al Gore to “reinvent government” along business-savvy lines, every new administration has ritually announced the same kind of effort: We will form a commission, and it will tap the collective genius of the American corporate world, and we will use that know-how to modernize the public sector’s backward bureaucracies!

Now it’s Donald Trump’s turn. His son-in-law, real-estate heir Jared Kushner, will lead the new White House Office of American Innovation (The Washington Post). It will be “a SWAT team of strategic consultants…staffed by former business executives and designed to infuse fresh thinking into Washington, float above the daily political grind and create a lasting legacy for a president still searching for signature achievements.” The list of the office’s advisers is tech-heavy, including names like Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Mark Benioff, and Elon Musk, and the work is expected to focus on privatization of services and functions now performed directly by the government.

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Internet Providers Selling Your Data? Senate Is Cool With That

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The NewCo Daily: Today’s Top Stories

Andrea Yori | Flickr

While the world was transfixed by the legislative train wreck of the Obamacare repeal effort in the House, the Senate was busy with its own mischief. On Thursday, it passed a bill that would remove Obama-era privacy restrictions from internet service providers (Buzzfeed). Republicans supported the bill, arguing that they were barring onerous rules that impede innovation, while Democrats maintained that the rules protect consumers. The bill still needs House approval and a presidential signature, but those are expected to come soon. “The Senate Prepares to Send Internet Privacy Down a Black Hole,” Wired headlined its story.

The FCC rules that are being trashed drew a distinction between ISPs like Verizon, Comcast, and AT&T, and online firms like Google and Facebook that build services on top of the internet access you pay those other companies for. The distinction may feel abstract and increasingly outdated in an era when your ISP might also be peddling its own content. Why should one kind of media company be more heavily regulated than another?

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Trump Takes Axe to Everything (Except the Military)

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The NewCo Daily: Today’s Top Stories

Upstream

Budgets aren’t just lists of priorities; they are statements of purpose and expressions of ideals. A U.S. president’s budget is only an advisory to Congress, which has constitutional authority over government spending. But presidents usually put a lot of care and energy into their budgets — particularly their first ones — because they provide leaders with a chance to say, “This is what I really care about.”

Based on his new budget proposal, President Trump cares very much about spending $54 billion more on the military and building a wall on the Mexican border. He does not care about funding for the State Department’s diplomacy, environmental protection, scientific research, the arts and humanities, and many other functions of government that he has proposed to cut back on or eliminate (Vox). These aren’t just ostensibly elitist institutions like the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities; they also include agencies dedicated to helping the kind of struggling heartland communities that elected Trump, like the Appalachian Regional Commission and Meals on Wheels.

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“Anarchy Is Good, Regulation is Bad”

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NewCo Shift Forum

The tech industry is poised to lead the resistance to Trump. But will it?


At the dawn of the Trump administration, a diverse panel of technology veterans — Fred Wilson, co-founder of Union Square Ventures, Rachel Whetstone, head of policy and communications for Uber, and DJ Patil, the outgoing Chief Data Scientist for the White House — went on the record to discuss the impact of a new and unpredictable administration on their industry. What resulted was a compelling, wide ranging, and sometimes salty exchange. Below is the video and the full transcript, edited for clarity.

John Heilemann (JH): Rachel Whetstone is the head of policy, and a bunch of other stuff at Uber. Fred, come on up. Fred, from Union Square Ventures. A man who’s a great venture capitalist, and also really interested in public policy. Then DJ Patil, who was the chief data scientist for the United States of America until a couple of days ago, and like Valarie Jarrett, now is enjoying actually sleeping regular hours.

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Hiring is Everything, Even at the White House

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The NewCo Daily: Today’s Top Stories

Whatshername | Flickr

Any leader of a growing company knows that hiring is crucial, and hiring is hard. You need to move fast or you can’t meet goals. But you need to move carefully because the wrong people will run your organization aground.

So far, the new Trump administration, despite its business background, has flunked the hiring test: It has moved slowly, yet it has failed to properly vet its picks, and it now faces a “personnel crisis” (The New York Times). Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Sharon LaFraniere write: “Many federal agencies and offices are in states of suspended animation, their career civil servants answering to temporary bosses whose influence and staying power are unclear, and who are sometimes awaiting policy direction from appointees whose arrival may be weeks or months away.”

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How Long Can Job Growth Keep Going?

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The NewCo Daily: Today’s Top Stories

Mike Steele | Flickr

235,000 more jobs in February: That’s the latest number from the Labor Department (Bloomberg). It means President Trump’s first month extends the trend of the long Obama recovery, which over the last five years averaged an addition of 205,000 jobs a month.

Trump is already taking credit for the rosy statistic, even if it almost certainly reflects the policies and choices of his predecessor (The Washington Post). The president has promised to create 25 million jobs in a decade, so this is roughly the pace he’s going to have to maintain through two terms (plus an additional two years of someone else’s term) to meet his goal (Vox).

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In Retail, Everything Old Is New Again

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The NewCo Daily: Today’s Top Stories

Sean | Flickr

Despite the relentless growth of online shopping, real-world retail is never going to vanish. It’s just going to keep mutating in surprising ways. Here are three telltale examples in the news:

  • Amazon, widely believed to be the Grim Reaper for bricks-and-mortar bookstores everywhere, keeps opening its own in-person outlets (Recode). The company just announced plans for number ten, in Bellevue, Washington. Huh? Why? Maybe now that the online giant has so thoroughly defeated its rivals, there’s room to grow again in the physical retail environment — turf that Amazon will now take for itself. Or maybe Jeff Bezos values these stores as showcases for Amazons lines of devices, its Echos, Dots, and Kindles. Either way, an Amazon Store may be coming to a mall near you.
  • Vending machines may be old school tech, but they’re undergoing a digital overhaul today (Alyssa Bereznak in The Ringer). New companies are selling wall-hanging boxes equipped with touchscreen controls that double, when idle, as advertising displays and social-media consoles for purchasers to share their joy on Facebook or Twitter. Sure, sellers save on labor, but there’s also a novelty factor: As Bereznak puts it, “People enjoy buying things from robots.”
  • Proof of that dictum can be found in the continuing experiment that is Eatsa — a startup that sells custom bowls of quinoa salad through a 21st-century update of the Horn & Hardart Automat. Eatsa — which now operates seven restaurants in San Francisco, Washington D.C., and New York — is super-progressive in many ways: vegetarian menu, sustainable ingredients, low prices. But Eatsa also puts a wall between you and the people making your food. That’s convenient, but not exactly humanist. One sign that the Eatsa equation might be a little awry: The best innovations don’t require instruction manuals, but The Washington Post felt it would be useful to run an explainer about how the place works.

Is Trump the “First Silicon Valley President”?

The tech industry is up in arms about many of President Trump’s policies, but — hold on — his approach to running the government is actually inspired by Silicon Valley ideas (Charles Duhigg in The New York Times).

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The Data Targeters Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight

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The NewCo Daily: Today’s Top Stories

Janna | Flickr

Since Donald Trump’s upset victory in November, there’s been a steady stream of stories crediting at least some of his win to an obscure data-analysis company called Cambridge Analytica. The company promised to use “psychographics” to target individual voters with digital ads. Its know-how, according to some accounts, helped surface a wave of Trump voters that conventional polls failed to measure.

Trouble is, Cambridge Analytica didn’t actually employ any of its psychographic profiling techniques on Trump’s behalf, and its actual role in the presidential campaign was modest at best (The New York Times). Some coverage has been skeptical from the start.

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Saving Democracy (and Capitalism) With Robert Reich

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NewCo Shift Dialogs, In Partnership with EY

Robert Reich had a lot to say about Donald Trump at the Shift Forum last month. Not much of it was nice.

Robert Reich at NewCo Shift Forum


Since leaving office as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich has built a career as a fierce critic of corporate America, reserving particular rancor for Republican policies that have enriched the wealthy and driven historic levels of income inequality around the globe. Now a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley, Reich has authored 14 books, including the classic Work of Nations, and his fiery manifesto Saving Capitalism (my review is here).

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Driving The Shift Towards a More Inclusive Country With Maya Rockeymoore

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Maya Rockeymoore, Ph.D, is a respected policy expert, strategist, and a longtime advocate for social and economic inclusion.

Rockeymoore runs Global Policy Solutions, a social change consulting firm (and certified B Corp) that works with clients across the private, public, and non-profit sectors. Rockeymoore founded the organization in 2005, long before the “mission-driven” business movement truly started gaining momentum.

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