Conservative groups ask WH to end Amazon talks over Pentagon contract

A coalition of five conservative groups sent a letter to the White House on Friday asking the Trump administration to abandon negotiations with Amazon over a lucrative $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract.

In a letter to Office of Management and Budget (OMB) acting director Russell Vought, the conservatives argued that the criteria for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract had “severely restricted the number of potential providers.”

The letter was signed by the presidents of the American Conservative Union, the Institute for Liberty, Taxpayers Protection Alliance, the organization Limited Government, and Citizens Against Government Waste.

The groups argued that the bidding process for the Pentagon contract was set up in a way that “predetermines” that the contract goes to a company with Level 6 cloud security requirements to host secret and top-secret data.

Critics of the procurement process maintain that such requirements are unnecessary and that Amazon is likely the only vendor that can fulfill them.

In the letter, the conservative groups said they’re also concerned about “the security impact of consolidating the services requested in the proposal to one unified platform, rather than using multiple cloud services.”