Persistent rumors have linked Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg with the post of Treasury secretary in a Hillary Clinton administration. Sandberg, a former chief of staff at the Treasury under Larry Summers, told a conference this month that she plans to stay at Facebook. Apple Inc.’s Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook and Microsoft Corp.’s founder Bill Gates were on a list of Clinton’s potential vice-presidential nominees, according to an e-mail allegedly from her campaign chair that was released by Wikileaks.
The administration’s view is that tech people are welcome in Washington because they can help make things work better -- and help is certainly needed.
Penny Pritzker, the commerce secretary, says the government is shifting toward using technology the way business has been doing for years. It has set up a coding boot-camp for employees, while data scientists work across federal agencies to mine the archives and help improve transportation projects.
‘Data as Currency’
“We view data as currency,” Pritzker said in an interview. She travels to Silicon Valley at least once a quarter and has an advisory council of 21 tech experts.
Megan Smith, the former Google manager who took a job as Obama’s chief technology officer in 2014, says the long-term goal is to make government services as smooth a user experience as that offered by, say, Amazon or Dropbox.
Collaboration with tech companies pre-dates Obama’s creation of a special post to oversee it. Zillow Group Inc., the real-estate website, helped the Treasury after the housing-market collapse, according to Stan Humphries, its chief analytics officer.
“I was struck by how little data the government had” in areas such as price indexes or foreclosures, Humphries said. The Seattle-based firm filled the gap, offering its micro-data to Federal Reserve researchers and even, on occasion, to Neel Kashkari, then an assistant secretary at the Treasury department and now in charge of the Minneapolis Fed. “They were soon sucking up every bit of data that we had available,” said Humphries.
Biggest Fear
In Washington, favors typically come at a price though. Tech giants, which are in the habit of buying up smaller companies and also trying to tie customers to their own platforms, keep a close watch on antitrust policy. In 2013, Google -- like Microsoft before it -- was threatened with a potentially costly legal battle. Federal Trade Commission staff said the company “unlawfully maintained its monopoly” over internet searches, though the 20-month probe was eventually closed.