Amazon poised to escalate Pentagon ‘war cloud’ fight

The fight over the Pentagon’s $10 billion “war cloud” contract is entering a new phase after the Department of Defense (DOD) awarded the lucrative contract to Microsoft over rival Amazon in a shocking move.

All eyes are now on Amazon, which is seen as likely to take the fight over the Pentagon’s decision to court or before the government’s top auditing office.

Democrats and industry watchers are raising the possibility that the process was swayed by President Trump, who publicly called on the DOD to investigate the contract over the summer. Trump questioned if the process unfairly favored Amazon, long seen as the front-runner.

Experts say it’s unprecedented: A challenge from Amazon’s cloud-computing arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS), involving allegations that the president improperly intervened in the contract process would be unprecedented. Some of the top federal contracting experts in the country told The Hill they can’t think of any similar case in recent history.

“We’ve had other contracts that have had major issues which were fought out in the public but none of which I’m aware where the president is alleged to have somehow tried to influence the procurement process,” Dave Drabkin, a former top procurement executive at the General Services Administration, told The Hill.

Steven Kelman, former head of the Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Federal Procurement and current professor of public management at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, called the president’s involvement in a specific contract “extremely unusual, close to unheard of.”

“It’s against the norms and expectations of a system,” Kelman said.

Trump’s involvement: Over the summer, Trump publicly questioned whether the JEDI contract was written with Amazon in mind, touting the argument that had been circulated for months by Amazon’s cloud-computing rival Oracle and a procession of Republican lawmakers.

During a news conference, Trump said, “I’m getting tremendous complaints about the contract with the Pentagon and with Amazon. They’re saying it wasn’t competitively bid.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., has publicly referred to the JEDI contract as the “corrupt #BezosBailout,” claiming it was written to bolster profits for the Amazon chief. The president’s public remarks about JEDI, paired with his open antagonism toward Bezos, has raised serious questions over whether Trump weighed in on Microsoft’s behalf in order to burn Amazon.

“The President’s public comments about the JEDI contract have been well outside the norm,” Rep. Jim Langevin (D-R.I.) said in a statement to The Hill. “If the President in fact took additional steps to influence the contract award, that would be a deeply disturbing development.”