Pentagon to review $10 billion JEDI contract after Trump claimed it favoured Amazon

President Trump has claimed that Amazon was involved in a conspiracy to win the contract

The US Defence Secretary is reviewing the $10 billion Pentagon JEDI cloud computing contract over claims that it favours Amazon.

The contract was expected to be awarded this month to either Amazon or Microsoft, after the two cloud computing giants made it to the final shortlist.

In a statement, Pentagon spokeswoman Elissa Smith said that Defence Secretary Mark Esper has decided to examine accusations of unfairness before a final decision is made on the contract.

"Keeping his promise to Members of Congress and the American public, Secretary Esper is looking at the Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure (JEDI) programme," Smith said in a statement late on Thursday.

I'm getting tremendous complaints about the contract with the Pentagon and with Amazon… They're saying it wasn't competitively bid

She continued: "No decision will be made on the programme until he has completed his examination."

When completed, the $10 billion contract would be one of the largest IT procurements ever made by the US government, and almost certainly the biggest single cloud-computing contract ever awarded.

However, the contracting process for the project, which attracted bids from IBM, Oracle, Amazon, Google and Microsoft, has been marred by a number of complaints.

First, Google announced its withdrawal from the bidding in October after several employees of the company raised concerns over supply of Google's technology to the military.

Microsoft employees also published an open letter to management in October, urging the company not to bid on the project. The employees said they did not join Microsoft to "enhance lethality".

Later, IBM Corp and Oracle were eliminated from the race, leaving Microsoft and Amazon as the final contenders for the award. That decision led Oracle to file a lawsuit against the Department of Defence, as the company told the court that contract requirements for the project favoured Amazon.

Tensions on the project rose again last month when President Trump stated that Amazon was involved in a conspiracy to win the contract. Trump said that he had received several complaints from tech firms about the specifications of the contract, which appear to favour Amazon.

President Trump has spoken out against Amazon, founded by Jeff Bezos, on a number of occasions. Trump has also criticised the Bezos-owned Washington Post, accusing it of being a "lobbyist newspaper" for Amazon.

"I'm getting tremendous complaints about the contract with the Pentagon and with Amazon… They're saying it wasn't competitively bid," Trump said in a July 18 press release.

In past weeks, some lawmakers on Capitol Hill also sent letters to the president, urging him to delay the contract until officials re-examine the award process.

Secretary Esper who only assumed his job on 23^rd July, said in a meeting with reporters recently that the JEDI deal is something that he wanted to take a "hard look at".

Objective critics of the deal have suggested that awarding one all-encompassing cloud computing contract to just one company naturally favoured the largest companies in the space. In addition, it would deny the Pentagon the opportunity to pick and choose the best or most suitable cloud services and technologies from across the sector, tying it in to just one vendor.