While controversy has dogged the $10 billion, decade-long JEDI contract since its earliest days, a report by the DoD’s Inspector General’s Office concluded today that, while there were some funky bits and potential conflicts, overall the contract procurement process was fair and legal and the president did not unduly influence the process in spite of public comments.
There were a number of issues along the way about whether the single contractor award was fair or reasonable, about whether there were was White House influence on the decision, and whether the president wanted to prevent Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, from getting the contract.
There were questions about whether certain personnel, who had been or were about to be Amazon employees, had undue influence on the contents of the RFP or if former Secretary of Defense showed favor to Amazon, which ultimately did not even win the contract, and that one of Mattis’ under secretaries, in fact, owned stock in Microsoft.
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It’s worth noting that the report states clearly that it is not looking at the merits of this contract award or whether the correct company won on technical acumen. It was looking at all of these controversial parts that came up throughout the process. As the report stated:
“In this report, we do not draw a conclusion regarding whether the DoD appropriately awarded the JEDI Cloud contract to Microsoft rather than Amazon Web Services. We did not assess the merits of the contractors’ proposals or DoD’s technical or price evaluations; rather we reviewed the source selection process and determined that it was in compliance with applicable statutes, policies, and the evaluation process described in the Request for Proposals.”
Although the report indicates that the White House would not cooperate with the investigation into potential bias, the investigators claim they had enough discussions with parties involved with the decision to conclude that there was no undue influence on the White House’s part:
“However, we believe the evidence we received showed that the DoD personnel who evaluated the contract proposals and awarded Microsoft the JEDI Cloud contract were not pressured regarding their decision on the award of the contract by any DoD leaders more senior to them, who may have communicated with the White House,” the report stated.
The report chose to blame the media instead, at least for partly giving the impression that the White House had influenced the process, stating:
“Yet, these media reports, and the reports of President Trump’s statements about Amazon, ongoing bid protests and “lobbying” by JEDI Cloud competitors, as well as inaccurate media reports about the JEDI Cloud procurement process, may have created the appearance or perception that the contract award process was not fair or unbiased.”
It’s worth noting that we reported that AWS president Andy Jassy made it clear in a press conference at AWS re:Invent in December that the company believed the president’s words had influenced the process.
“I think that we ended up with a situation where there was political interference. When you have a sitting president, who has shared openly his disdain for a company, and the leader of that company, it makes it really difficult for government agencies, including the DoD, to make objective decisions without fear of reprisal.”
As for other points of controversy, such as those previously referenced biases, all were found lacking by the Inspector General. While the earliest complaints from Oracle and others were that Deap Ubhi and Victor Gavin, two individuals involved in drafting the RFP, failed to disclose they were offered jobs by Amazon during that time.
The report concluded that while Ubhi violated ethics rules, his involvement wasn’t substantial enough to influence the RFP (which again, Amazon didn’t win). “However, we concluded that Mr. Ubhi’s brief early involvement in the JEDI Cloud Initiative was not substantial and did not provide any advantage to his prospective employer, Amazon…,” the report stated.
The report found Gavin did not violate any ethics rules in spite of taking a job with Amazon because he had disqualified himself from the process, nor did the report find that former Secretary Mattis had any ethical violations in its investigation.
One final note: Stacy Cummings, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Acquisition Enablers, who worked for Mattis, owned some stock in Microsoft and did not disclose this. While the report found that was a violation of ethics guidelines, it ultimately concluded this did not unduly influence the award to Microsoft.
While the report is a substantial, 313 pages, it basically concludes that as far as the purview of the Inspector General is concerned, the process was basically conducted in a fair way. The court case, however involving Amazon’s protest of the award to Microsoft continues. And the project remains on hold until that is concluded.
Note: Microsoft and Amazon did not respond to requests from TechCrunch for comments before we published this article. If that changes, we will update accordingly.
Report on the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (Jedi) Cloud Procurement Dodig-2020-079 by TechCrunch on Scribd
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