I worked for Jared Kushner. He’s the wrong businessman to reinvent government.

How the New York Observer could predict the fate of the Office of American Innovation.

 .. I summoned our beleaguered IT guy to explain, and he informed me that it had belonged to Kushner, who liked the design of Apple products but preferred the Windows OS.
.. I was the only candidate he interviewed who asked to see the Observer’s financials before I would take the job.
.. I couldn’t persuade Kushner to recapitalize the Observer — even though I reached all my numbers. When the paper had a profitable quarter for what I was told was the first time, Kushner floated the idea of layoffs to increase the margins, seemingly ignoring the fact that staff reductions would also reduce ad inventory by reducing content.
.. He wanted the Observer to be cheaper to run, usually at the expense of growth and evolution, and he could not see the relationship between scale and profit — between risk and reward.
.. Kushner would frequently point to a media company with a 60-person editorial staff and ask why our two-person desk wasn’t producing as many stories or as much traffic.
.. That same obsession with the tech world permeates Kushner’s new project. Cost-cutting is important in situations where there is excess, but it is not what catalyzes evolution; if the point here is to make government more effective, not just more efficient, cuts alone won’t do it.
.. But a more logical explanation is that systems upgrades require appropriations, many of which have been gleefully slashed by Congress.
.. There are many government functions that have no analog in the private sector, she pointed out, like maintaining a nuclear arsenal.
.. he was sure he had the goods. When I worked for him, I wasn’t sure he had a realistic view of his own capabilities since, like his father-in-law, he seemed to view his wealth and its concomitant accoutrements as rewards for his personal success in business, and not something he would have had in any case. To me, he appeared to view his position and net worth as the products of an essentially meritocratic process.
.. I realize also, in retrospect, that he may never have intended to grow it or improve it. It was for him, in essence, another vanity object — like the beautiful, expensive desktop computer he used as a monitor.