As a rule, federal contracting disputes don’t serve as great click-bait, but yesterday marked the end of an interesting Trump-era controversy. NBC News reported:
The Department of Defense announced Tuesday it’s calling off the $10 billion cloud contract that was the subject of a legal battle involving Amazon and Microsoft. The JEDI, or Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, deal has become one of the most tangled contracts for the Department of Defense. In a press release Tuesday, the Pentagon said that “due to evolving requirements, increased cloud conversancy, and industry advances, the JEDI Cloud contract no longer meets its needs.”
For those who may need a refresher, let’s back up and revisit our earlier coverage to review how we arrived at this point.
Early on in Donald Trump’s term, Axios spoke to five sources close to the White House who said the Republican was eager to “go after” Amazon and its CEO, Jeff Bezos. Referring to Trump, one source said at the time, “He’s obsessed with Amazon. Obsessed.” The article added, “The president would love to clip CEO Jeff Bezos’ wings.”
It was against this backdrop that the Pentagon was reportedly prepared to announce a decision on the JEDI contract, at which point Trump announced that he was looking “very seriously” at intervening in the contracting process because unnamed people had told him “it wasn’t competitively bid.”
Even at the time, the comments were odd: There was a competitive bidding process, and no company had secured the contract.
Nevertheless, on the heels of the then-president’s comments, then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper said he intended to review the contract. According to a Washington Post report, the Pentagon chief’s reexamination was the result of White House instructions and “11th-hour Oval Office intervention.” There were “concerns” in the West Wing, the article added, that the lucrative contract “would go to Amazon.”









