Inside Trump's advisory panel meeting with 17 CEOs

Mark Weinberger — CEO of EY, one of the world’s “big four” accounting firms — spoke at Yahoo Finance’s All Markets Summit on Wednesday about President Donald Trump’s first meeting with a group of 17 high-profile CEOs serving on a presidential advisory panel.

The CEOs, who also include JPMorgan Chase’s (JPM) Jamie Dimon, Pepsi’s (PEP) Indra Nooyi, and BlackRock’s Larry Fink (BLK), discussed five to six different issues including deregulation, tax reform, women in the workforce, and immigration, according to Weinberger.

“At the end of each topic, it was about okay, what’s next? … It was an action-oriented discussion,” said Weinberger, who also described the meeting on Friday as “energizing” during his conversation with Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Christoforous.

Trump announced his advisory council in December, calling it the President’s Strategic and Advisory Forum. Some CEOs have gotten flak for being on the advisory council, including Oracle’s Safra Catz, whose participation led one executive to resign in protest. More recently, Uber’s Travis Kalanick quit the council amid intense pressure.

Speaking about the first meeting of the CEOs, Weinberger said, “There was lots of honest discussion.”

That discussion included Trump’s abrupt order last month on immigration. The new president caused chaos at US airports on Jan. 27 with an executive order temporarily barring entry of many people from seven Muslim-majority countries. The order also suspended entry of all refugees. A federal judge in Washington issued a nationwide ruling that lifts the ban, and an appeals court rejected Trump’s request to reinstate the travel ban right away.

After the ban, Weinberger sent a memo to his employees noting that the ban would have an impact on the company’s “ability to work as a globally connected organization.” He stopped short of denouncing it outright. Speaking to Yahoo Finance on Wednesday, Weinberger stressed that the president merely ordered a “pause period” on immigration from the seven affected countries and did not ban entry indefinitely. Weinberger indicated on Wednesday that Trump was receptive to feedback about the order from his new advisory panel.

“I think he [Trump] learned a lot about how maybe this is going to proceed after the pause,” Weinberger told Yahoo Finance on Wednesday.

Trump also signaled that he wanted to act to fulfill his campaign promises to the Rust Belt voters who helped put him in office, according to Weinberger. And the new president, like President Barack Obama who came before him, will act with or without Congress. Trump, Weinberger says, recognizes he can “do a lot on his own to expedite things.”

One thing Weinberger would like expedited is tax reform and, in particular, lowering the corporate tax rate. House Republicans are already pushing a plan to cut the corporate tax rate from its current rate of 35% — one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world — down to 20%.

“What we really need to do … is adhere to that commitment to get tax reform done this year,” Weinberger said. He added, “The idea is to act quickly, get the House and the Senate and the president on the same page.”

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