Pentagon puts on hold $10B cloud tech contract

The Pentagon said Thursday it’s delaying the award of a hotly contested $10 billion contract for cloud computing services for the military until Defense Secretary Mark Esper can review the matter.

The announcement came two weeks after President Donald Trump said he would be looking “very seriously” at the contract process, based on what he called “tremendous complaints” from competitors of Amazon, which has been seen as the top contender for the contract.

Trump frequently has attacked Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, owns the Washington Post.

The postponement comes after months of jostling, including lawsuits and accusations of illicit influence.

The contest, for one of the biggest federal information technology contracts in history, had come down to Amazon and Microsoft, after Oracle and IBM had been eliminated.

Oracle in particular has continued to fight a legal and lobbying battle to prevent or delay the award, including lobbying the White House and persuading friendly members of Congress, including Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., to weigh in with the president.

Other members of Congress have said there should be no further delay, arguing the United States already is lagging behind other countries in applying the latest cloud technology to military enterprises.

Amazon Web Services, the company’s powerhouse cloud operation, virtually invented cloud computing and has provided services to the CIA for years.

That history widely was seen as giving Amazon the inside track for the Defense Department contract, called Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI.

“Secretary Esper is committed to ensuring our war fighters have the best capabilities, including artificial intelligence, to remain the most lethal force in the world, while safeguarding taxpayer dollars,” Elissa Smith, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said in a statement.

Saying that Esper would be “looking at” the program, she added: “No decision will be made on the program until he has completed his examination.”

In a brief interview, Smith declined to say how long the examination was expected to take or what it would involve.

Nor would she say whether Trump or his aides had discussed the contract with Esper or other Pentagon officials.