Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who attended the White House's tech summit, reportedly offered “really good ideas' for the Trump administration to consider, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said.
Mnuchin refused to answer questions by CNBC about whether candidate Trump's animosity toward Bezos during the 2016 president campaign would influence the administration's stance on Amazon's recently announced $13.7 billion deal to buy Whole Foods Market.
“It's not for us to comment on the deal one way or another," he told CNBC. But he said Bezos has "a lot of really good ideas for the administration."
Technology CEOs were urged by the White House on Monday to pitch in on President Donald Trump's effort to modernize government, the Associated Press reported.
Apple CEO Tim Cook and Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google parent company Alphabet, were among those attending an afternoon of working groups on issues like technology infrastructure, cyber security and visas for foreign workers.
The gathering was the first event for a technology-focused effort within the White House Office of American Innovation, which seeks to overhaul government functions using ideas from the business sector.
Jared Kushner, senior adviser and son-in-law to Trump, welcomed the technology executives, calling them "a very impressive group of leaders from the private sector" being put to work "on some of the country's biggest challenges that will make a very meaningful difference to a lot of its citizens."
"We had an amazing day yesterday with tech leaders showing us and helping us [on] how we can move government into the next century, whether it's cybersecurity, whether it's updating our aged infrastructure. We've underinvested in technology for too long," Mnuchin told CNBC.
(Newsmax wire services and Reuters and Bloomberg contributed to this report).