Amazon: Trump used “improper pressure” to block AWS from DOD cloud contract

Enlarge / The JEDI contract is central to DOD's efforts to rapidly adopt cloud technology. But the winner-take-all contract offer has been controversial from the start-and now Amazon claims President Trump put a whole lot more than a finger on the scales to ensure AWS lost. (credit: Department of Defense)

In a redacted filing released today by the US Federal Court of Claims, attorneys for Amazon asserted that Amazon Web Service's loss of the Department of Defense Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud computing contract to Microsoft's Azure was the result of "improper pressure from President Donald J. Trump, who launched repeated public and behind-the-scenes attacks to steer the JEDI Contract away from AWS to harm his perceived political enemy-Jeffrey P. Bezos, founder and CEO of AWS' parent company, Amazon.com, Inc. ("Amazon"), and owner of the Washington Post."

The suit cites Trump's instructions to former Secretary of Defense James Mattis to "screw Amazon" out of the contract, as recounted by Mattis' former chief speechwriter, and numerous other incidents of direct interference by Trump in the contract competition, including ordering an "independent" review of the contract by Defense Secretary Mark Esper in August of 2019.

JEDI was awarded to Microsoft in October. The $10 billion contract is for a DOD-wide enterprise Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service(PaaS) program providing compute and storage services-including delivering them to the "tactical edge," giving troops in the field access to critical data. The initial expenditure, scheduled for the first year of the contract, would be just $1 million-but it would be followed by a base two-year ordering period and up to eight years of optional extensions out to 2029, with a capped value of $10 billion.

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