JEDI Project — Amazon Files a Notice in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims

By IndraStra Global News Team

By IndraStra Global News Team

Image Attribute: An aerial photo of Pentagon / Source: Pixabay.com

Last month, Pentagon awarded the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract to Microsoft. And, yesterday (on November 14, 2019), Amazon filed a notice in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims indicating a plan to protest the Pentagon’s decision. In an emailed response to Amazon’s statement, Defense Department spokeswoman Elissa Smith said to the Washington Post, “We will not speculate on potential litigation.”

In a statement, Amazon's cloud unit argued that "numerous aspects of the JEDI evaluation process contained clear deficiencies, errors, and unmistakable bias- and it's important that these matters be examined and rectified."

Amazon's Amazon Web Services (AWS) is generally considered as one of the leading cloud infrastructure providers and when bidding on JEDI opened in 2018, Amazon was seen as the only company that already matched the qualifications and was thus considered the frontrunner to win the bid. 

But, Oracle and IBM filed pre-award bid protests with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in August 2018 citing, among other concerns, the fact that the Pentagon intends to award the contract to a single vendor.

The competition got a new twist when just three days before JEDI bids were due (in October 2018), Google dropped out citing employee outrage and not being able to comply with projects' current government certifications.

Earlier in August 2019, weeks before the winner was expected to be announced, President Donald Trump ordered the contract to be placed on hold again and directed Defense Secretary Mark Esper to investigate complaints of favoritism towards Amazon. 

At that time, Pentagon spokeswoman Elissa Smith in a statement to reporters said, “Secretary Esper is committed to ensuring our warfighters have the best capabilities, including Artificial Intelligence, to remain the most lethal force in the world, while safeguarding taxpayer dollars. Keeping his promise to members of Congress and the American public, Secretary Esper is looking at the [JEDI] program. No decision will be made on the program until he has completed his examination.”

Media has noted Trump's dislike towards Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post newspaper which is being critical of his presidency. Also, a book by a former Pentagon official Cmdr. Guy Snodgrass (Retd., US Navy) released last month claimed Trump wanted to “screw” Amazon by denying it the JEDI contract but and the Defense Secretary (of that time) Gen. James N. Mattis refused to do so.