Tech leaders want to help Trump save $1 trillion

In December 2016, a bunch of bigwig tech executives met with President-elect Donald Trump in New York. Apple’s Tim Cook was there. So were Oracle’s Safra Catz, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and investor and Trump supporter Peter Thiel. In some ways, it looked like the nation’s tech titans — many of whom either didn’t support Trump or were flat-out against his presidential bid — were trying to make peace with the man who will be the nation’s ultimate chief executive for the next four years. When you’re going to meet the boss, it helps to tell him or her something they will like. And one of the things bosses like most is being able to save money. For politicians, this means the ability to tell the voters, “Look what I did for you.” And on that day in December, those giants of the tech sector presented Trump with a plan to save the government more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years. How? Enacting a slate of new tech-based policies. Among the proposals are improvements in supply chain operations ($500 billion), getting rid of fraudulent payments ($270 billion) and just modernizing IT facilities and operations ($110 billion). The idea would be to use that $1 trillion for a widespread infrastructure overhaul and the creation of thousands of “new collar” jobs.