The Department of Defense is expected to offer $5 billion to Amazon to act as the military’s sole cloud solution provider. Only in America could Jeff Bezos have started an online bookstore in 1994 that would eventually be approached by one of the largest agencies within the federal government. While this story should be one focused on success, the pending contract should raise bipartisan concerns about the costs of no-bid contracts, the prevalence of single-source providers, and the outsized role of unelected civil servants in the federal bureaucracy.

It’s no secret that the government is always several steps behind when it comes to technological innovation. The DoD determined that it needs to update its cloud services architecture, but does not have the capacity to do so on their own. An ad hoc committee, called the Defense Department Cloud Executive Steering Group, or CESG, published a “Request for Information” soliciting advice from the private sector on how to modernize its cloud services.