In 2018, the Department of Defense (DoD) began soliciting proposals for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), a cloud procurement initiative. The proposal promised a coveted $10 billion contract for a 10-year term, drawing the attention of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and Google.
Since then, the department's procurement process has been highly scrutinized for both its controversial winner-take-all and fixed-price-for-undefined-requirements strategies. Nor did attention wane after two of the main competitors, Oracle and Amazon Web Services (AWS), opened suits citing improper handling of the acquisition.
Throughout the course of the JEDI controversy, Professor Steven L. Schooner provided legal analysis of government procurement law with news organizations such as the Associated Press, Bloomberg, and The Washington Post, as well as with industry news sources like the Federal News Network, Federal Computer Week, and Breaking Defense.
"It is difficult to recall any prior procurement of this scale, value, and significance in which two of the four leading competitors had compelling conflicts of interest or bias allegations," he told Bloomberg. "This is extraordinary."
Oracle's ongoing court battle alleges two DoD officials, who played a potential role in the development and acquisition of the JEDI solicitation, were offered jobs at AWS. Complicating the case, Amazon is also citing bias allegations against the DoD after President Trump openly criticized CEO Jeff Bezos and DoD surprised the competitors and the community by awarding the contract to Microsoft. Both cases are still ongoing; Oracle has appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and Amazon filed a motion to halt work on JEDI.
"No one seems to deny that these were actual conflicts and the players affirmatively attempted to conceal them," Professor Schooner told the Associated Press. "That simply cannot be tolerated."
Within legal scholarship, Professor Schooner published an article on the alleged manner in which the DoD conducted the disappointed offeror's post-award debriefing following the award of the $10 billion cloud computing contracting opportunity. While the quality of DoD’s debriefing is unlikely to alter the outcome in the pending protest litigation, it seems inconsistent with policy, the current trend favoring greater transparency, and the recent Congressional mandate for "enhanced debriefings," he writes.
Before joining GW Law's Government Procurement Law program, Professor Schooner served as the Associate Administrator for Procurement Law and Legislation at the Office of Federal Procurement Policy in the Office of Management and Budget. His scholarship focuses primarily on federal government contract law and public procurement policy. Outside of the United States, he has taught and advised hundreds of government officials on public procurement issues, either directly or through multi-government programs, in more than 30 countries.
Follow Professor Schooner on Twitter at @ProfSchooner.