DOD offers narrow corrective action for JEDI

The Defense Department has asked the U.S. Court of Federal Claims for a pause so it can “reconsider” parts of its decision to award Microsoft the $10 billion JEDI cloud infrastructure contract.

Amazon Web Services has taken DOD and by extension, Microsoft, to court to overturn the decision.

In approving an injunction to stop work on JEDI, Judge Patricia Campbell-Smith said that AWS was likely to win its protest because of issues with how DOD evaluated to factors under for one price scenario in the proposals.

It is that pricing scenario, known as Price Scenario 6, that DOD asking for time to re-evaluate. DOD said that it might allow AWS and Microsoft to make amendments, but only to factors 5 and 9 under Price Scenario 6.

That’s a very narrow area of revision, so it is no surprise that AWS is opposed to DOD’s request, according to the DOD filing.

Meanwhile, DOD says that Microsoft supports the request or in the words of the filing, “does not oppose this motion.”

The narrow scope raises the likelihood that DOD will fix the one area of the proposals that the judge has so far found fault with and then award JEDI again to Microsoft.

The judge hasn’t ruled yet and AWS will likely file some sort of response.

The judge has DOD’s motion under consideration and because of that has paused the other five motions pending in the case. These include two AWS motions to supplement the administrative record. That is AWS’ attempt to depose President Trump and others as it tries to prove that there was a political bias against AWS.

Two motions are from DOD and Microsoft asking that the judge dismiss AWS’ lawsuit. The last motion is by the Protect Democracy Project, which wants to file an amicus brief.