Excerpts from the AWS Public Sector Blog 

JEDI: Why we will continue to protest this politically corrupted contract award

by AWS Public Sector Blog Team | on 04 SEP 2020 | in Defense, Government, Public Sector

Earlier today, the DoD announced it had concluded its corrective action and affirmed its prior JEDI contract award to Microsoft. Taking corrective action should have provided the DoD an opportunity to address the numerous material evaluation errors outlined in our protest, ensure a fair and level playing field, and ultimately, expedite the conclusion of litigation. Unfortunately, the DoD rejected that opportunity.

As we continue to pursue a fair and impartial review, and ensure our country gets the best possible technical capability to protect itself, we wanted to reflect on how and why we’ve arrived at this point.

AWS is honored to support our nation’s military, and extremely proud of our role in helping U.S. government customers achieve mission success. Today, over 6,500 government agencies rely on the AWS Cloud to achieve an unmatched level of security, agility, innovation, and reliability. It is our commitment to supporting the U.S. military, and our experience earning trust and helping deliver transformational results within the Intelligence Community, that led us to bid on JEDI. We felt strongly then, just as we do now, that our technology is uniquely suited to help our military maintain an edge on the digital battlefield of today, and tomorrow.

We also remain grounded in the facts: AWS is the clear leader in cloud computing, and by any objective measure, has superior technology. AWS has more services, and more features within those services, than any other cloud provider—by a large amount. AWS provides a more secure and more operationally performant offering, and remains the only cloud provider accredited to support the full range of U.S. government data classifications. AWS also has a much broader ecosystem of ISV and SaaS partners whose software runs on AWS, so customers can use the same software they’ve been running on-premises, in the cloud. We welcome competition, but any objective, apples-to-apples assessment based purely on the offerings, clearly leads to a different conclusion than the DoD made.

The ongoing dismissal of inspectors general across our government, civil servants who are entrusted to ensure ethical conduct, is another worrying trend. The President has removed perceived political threats from their roles simply for doing their jobs, including demoting the Acting DoD Inspector General just days before the release of the JEDI Report. A similar pattern has emerged within the DoD as senior military leadership cannot exercise their sound judgment without facing retribution. Even those who serve our country in the pursuit of justice and fairness under the law, have been sidelined by the President in favor of blatant cronyism. Likewise, the President has become emboldened of late in flaunting his role influencing government contracts for politically motivated reasons. When discussing a recent U.S. Navy award that selected a Wisconsin-based firm to build a new $5.5 billion frigate, President Trump stated, “I hear the maneuverability is one of the big factors that you were chosen for the contract…the other is your location in Wisconsin, if you want to know the truth.”

There is a recurring pattern to the way President Trump behaves when he’s called out for doing something egregious: first he denies doing it, then he looks for ways to push it off to the side, to distract attention from it and delay efforts to investigate it (so people get bored and forget about it). And then he ends up doubling down on the egregious act anyway. On JEDI, President Trump reportedly ordered former Secretary Mattis to “screw’” Amazon, blatantly interfered in an active procurement, directed his subordinate to conduct an unorthodox “review” prior to a contract award announcement and then stonewalled an investigation into his own political interference. “Corrective action” was used as a way to halt our litigation, delay further investigations and incorrectly give the appearance that only one issue needed to be fixed while giving the impression that the DoD was actually going to fix something. While corrective action can be used to efficiently resolve protests, in reality, this corrective action changed nothing, wasted five months that could have been spent getting to the bottom of these serious concerns, and was designed solely to distract from our broader concerns and reaffirm a decision that was corrupted by the President’s self-interest. When we opposed the DoD’s approach to corrective action, we predicted this would happen, and it has. By continuing to delay, distract, and avoid addressing these very serious issues, the DoD is turning out to be its own worst enemy with regard to speeding things along.

[OCS: It is clear, at least to me, that Amazon Web Services has an animus against President Donald Trump and may also look unkindly on any platform that gives rise to the voices of pro-Trump supporters. Not to mention currying favor with the incoming progressive administration that appears desperate to escape the accountability for unconstitutional and/or criminal acts allegedly committed by the prior progressive Obama administration, many of whose members will serve in the incoming administration.

Ironic that Amazon would mention “delay, distract, and avoid addressing serious issues,” which is the modus operandi of the progressive socialist Democrats with whom Amazon appears to be seeking favor.]