WASHINGTON Pentagon leader defends award of disputed contract
Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Friday he was certain that the awarding of a $10 billion cloudcomputing contract to Microsoft instead of Amazon was done fairly.
The Pentagon awarded the contract to Microsoft in late October, and Amazon said there was “unmistakable bias” on the government’s part and it intended to challenge the decision in court.
Esper recused himself from the contract decision because his son had worked for one of the other unsuccessful bidders.
“I am confident that it was conducted freely and fairly without any type of outside influence,“Esper said while traveling in South Korea.
Amazon’s competitive bid for the “war cloud” project drew criticism from President Trump and its business rivals. The project, formally called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, pitted leading tech titans Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle and IBM against one another.
In a statement Thursday, Amazon said “numerous aspects” of the bidding process involved “clear deficiencies, errors, and unmistakable bias.” It did not elaborate on those allegations but said “it’s important that these matters be examined and rectified.”
JEDI will store and process vast amounts of classified data, allowing the U.S. military to use artificial intelligence to speed up its war planning and fighting capabilities.
Amazon was long thought to be the frontrunner for the contract. Its Amazon Web Services division is far ahead of secondplace Microsoft in cloud computing, and Amazon has experience handling highly classified government data.
But Trump said publicly that other “great companies” should have a chance at the contract. Trump has openly criticized Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, who also owns the Washington Post.
Amazon said it filed its protest in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, which deals with financial claims against the federal government.