Trump wants Pentagon’s cloud deal probed
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Thursday said he would direct aides to investigate a pending military contract widely expected to be awarded to Amazon Web Services, saying he had heard multiple complaints about an unfair bidding process.
His involvement would be an unusual Oval Office intervention in a process normally handled by military officials trained to follow complicated procurement laws and regulations.
The Pentagon has not announced a winner for the soughtafter cloud contract, which has a $10 billion cost ceiling over a 10year period. But executives at several of Amazon’s competitors have complained to Trump about the process, alleging the not-yetawarded contract was biased in favor of Amazon from the start. Some companies have found that personally appealing to Trump on a number of issues can lure him to get involved.
“I’m getting tremendous complaints about the contract with the Pentagon and with Amazon. … They’re saying it wasn’t competitively bid,” Trump said Thursday. “Some of the greatest companies in the world are complaining about it, having to do with Amazon and the Department of Defense, and I will be asking them to look at it very closely to see what’s going on.”
The president said he had heard complaints from “companies like Microsoft, Oracle and IBM,” each of which have bid on the contract. The Pentagon ruled recently that only Amazon and Microsoft meet the minimum requirements.
Microsoft is on the list of companies allegedly complaining to the White House about the contract. The company hadn’t publicly criticized the process previously and is a finalist, along with Amazon, to win the massive winner-take-all contract.
Microsoft spokeswoman Izzy Santa declined to comment. Representatives from Amazon and Oracle did not immediately respond to requests for comment. (Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post.)
A Defense Department Spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The president was referring to a pending Defense Department contract called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI for short, which is designed to build a departmentwide cloud computing infrastructure for the military. The contract is meant to modernize the U.S. military’s computing infrastructure and lay the groundwork for advanced artificial intelligence technology.
With a maximum value of $10 billion over a 10-year period, the contract could give the winner a dominant position in the emerging federal IT market, where the Pentagon is the biggest spender by far. It would absorb dozens of separate clouds the Pentagon is running, suggesting some legacy contractors could be swept aside. And it could open up future opportunities for the winner, as the Defense Department integrates JEDI into its operations.
Raising the specter of yet another time-consuming review of the contracting process could delay an award that was scheduled for late last year.
IBM and Oracle challenged the Pentagon’s decision to award the contract to a single company, first through protests with the Government Accountability Office, which were respectively denied and dismissed last year. Oracle then filed a motion to block the contract with the Court of Federal Claims. That touched off a highly unusual eight-month court battle in which lawyers from Amazon and the Defense Department joined forces to defend a procurement process that has not officially determined a winner.