Report: Kushner to head new office tasked with fixing government inefficiency
The the president's daughter, Ivanka Trump, will reportedly play a role in the newly established innovation office, assisting in resource development.
By JPOST.COM STAFFUpdated: MARCH 27, 2017 10:09Ivanka Trump with husband Jared Kushner(photo credit: REUTERS)
US President Donald Trump will appoint his son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner, to head a newly created office tasked with organizing the government's vast bureaucracy, The Washington Post reported Monday.The White House Office of American Innovation, designed to restructure complicated state institutions to resemble an efficient company, will look to giant tech firms and CEOs in order to adopt ideas to the new commission.Described in thepaper as the administration's "SWAT team," the project will benefit from the assistance of Apple CEO Tim Cook, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. “We should have excellence in government,” Kushner told the Post. “The government should be run like a great American company. Our hope is that we can achieve successes and efficiencies for our customers, who are the citizens.”The Post also reported that the president's daughter, Ivanka Trump, will play a role with the new innovation office, assisting in resource development.The first daughter, who was bestowed with an informal White House position and security clearance last week, will not have an official title in the new office. According to the report, some of the subjects the new innovation office is slated to tackle in the hopes of streamlining the current system are veteran affairs, modernized technology and data infrastructure of federal departments and agencies and remodeled workforce-training programs.Speaking to the Post about the new office, President Trump said that "all Americans, regardless of their political views, can recognize that government stagnation has hindered our ability to properly function, often creating widespread congestion and to leading to cost overruns and delays."Ivanka Trump saying that her father Donald Trump will work for all Americans on Feb. 21, 2016Lauding the new office as an obvious implementation of his famous campaign promise to "Make America great again," Trump added that he had "promised the American people I would produce results, and apply my 'ahead of schedule, under budget' mentality to the government."By taking on yet another role as the head of the new innovation office, 36-year-old Kushner's large influence over White House policies will expand even further. Kusnher, a real estate and media executive, is already acting as a shadow diplomat in the Trump administration, serving as a lead adviser on relations with China, Mexico, Canada and the Middle East.
Kushner, an orthodox Jew, has significant influence over Trump's foreign policy, especially after the latter appointed his son-in-law to "broker a Middle East peace deal" between Israel and the Palestinians.In an interview with the Times of London, Trump said that Kushner would take on the task of negotiating a peace agreement between the two parties – an appointment Trump has previously floated due to the fact that Kushner "knows the region, knows the people, knows the players."Kushner has no previous diplomatic experience, but steered Trump's foreign policy throughout his presidential campaign and subsequent presidential transition.Michael Wilner contributed to this article.