Pentagon seeks ‘to reconsider’ cloud contract to Microsoft

San Francisco

The US Department of Defense said Thursday it wants to reconsider its decision to award a multibillion-dollar military cloud computing contract to Microsoft in a bidding process Amazon claims was tainted by politics.

A judge last month issued an order at Amazon’s request temporarily blocking the US military from starting work on the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract, or JEDI.

In a filing late Thursday in a federal court, government attorneys asked for the matter to be “remanded,” or sent back, to the Pentagon “for 120 days to reconsider certain aspects of the challenged agency decision.” The Pentagon attorneys said the motion came in response to the judge stalling the awarding of the JEDI contract on the grounds Amazon Web Services (AWS) would “likely be able to show” that the department erred in evaluating its proposal.

“We are pleased that the DoD has acknowledged ‘substantial and legitimate’ issues that affected the JEDI award decision, and that corrective action is necessary,” an AWS spokesperson said in a statement.

Amazon argues it was shut out of the deal because of President Donald Trump’s vendetta against the company and its chief executive Jeff Bezos. “DoD wishes to reconsider its award decision in response to the other technical challenges presented by AWS,” the government attorneys said in the filing.

A re-evaluation, the filing said, “is in the interests of justice because it will provide the agency with an opportunity to reconsider the award decision at issue in light of AWS’s allegations, this court’s opinion, and any new information gathered.”