White House press secretary Sarah Sanders says President Trump is “not involved” in a multibillion-dollar cloud computing deal being awarded this year by the Pentagon.
Amazon Web Services is seen by competitors as a front-runner for the contract, which could run up to 10 years with an estimated value of $10 billion.
“The president is not involved in the process. DOD runs a competitive bidding process,” Sanders said Wednesday at the daily White House briefing.
The Pentagon currently plans to select a single source for the the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract, with bids open in May and a winner announced in September. Some Amazon rivals urged multiple vendors.
Pentagon spokeswoman Heath Babb told the Washington Examiner that widespread speculation about Amazon being a shoe-in for the JEDI deal is incorrect.
“No companies were pre-selected. We have no favorites, and we want the best solution for the department,” Babb said.
Trump’s ire against Amazon exploded on Twitter last week, with the president hitting the web giant on shipping costs and its effect on small retailers.
Trump’s first tweet was published at 7:57 a.m. on March 29, about an hour after Less Government president Seton Motley appeared on “Fox and Friends,” Trump’s favorite morning show, to denounce Amazon’s path to get the cloud contract.
Two days earlier, the New York Post ran a full-page ad for which Motley paid $25,000, knowing Trump reads the paper. He also targeted promoted tweets to Washington, D.C., users.
Full page ad in the New York Post. Bezos has smart enemies. pic.twitter.com/eilLlnG3Bh
— Arthur Schwartz (@ArthurSchwartz) March 27, 2018
Motley declined to identify the source of his advertising budget. He said the intellectual argument against a single-source contract is more important that his funding.
“It’s a terrible idea having a sole-source 10-year contract in tech for the Defense Department,” Motley told the Washington Examiner. “Part of it is Amazon because [CEO Jeff Bezos is] a left-wing asshat who’s going to take this money and try to stop everything the Trump administration is going to do — that’s part of it, but that’s not the primary problem.”
Suspicion that Amazon Web Services is in line for the contract is largely guesswork, based in part on AWS’s dominant market position. Amazon already has a $600 million 10-year cloud computing contract with the CIA.
Concern among competitors grew after the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley-based innovation office awarded a $950 million contract in February to the Virginia company REAN Cloud, which touted its work with Amazon.
After the REAN contract was announced, Oracle senior vice president Ken Glueck told the Washington Post, “how does it makes sense to spend a billion dollars to move to Amazon’s cloud before you’ve made the decision of what cloud you’re moving to?” The REAN contract was reduced last month to $65 million.
Bias in government contracts can be grounds to overturn awards, but legal experts say it can be difficult to distinguish unlawful bias from pretextual rationales for selecting one company over another.
