US Defense Department asks federal court for 120 days to re-examine certain aspects of JEDI cloud contract

The Department says it wants to re-evaluate a pricing clause, in particular

The US Department of Defense (DoD) has asked the Court of Federal Claims to allow it to re-examine certain aspects of its JEDI cloud contract with Microsoft.

In a filing to the court on Thursday, lawyers for the DoD asked a federal judge to grant the Department 120 days to reconsider its decision. The move came in response to technical challenges presented by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

According to Reuters, the Department informed the court that it wants, in particular, to re-evaluate a pricing clause, and does not anticipate a need to discuss the matter with Microsoft or AWS.

"DoD also wishes to reconsider its evaluation of the offerors' online marketplace offerings and may conduct clarifications with the offerors relating to the availability of marketplace offerings," the Defense Department said, according to the filing [PDF].

In a statement, AWS said that it was "pleased" to know that the Defense Department had finally acknowledged that there were legitimate issues in its award decision.

"We look forward to complete, fair, and effective corrective action that fully insulates the re-evaluation from political influence and corrects the many issues affecting the initial flawed award," the company said.

Microsoft also expressed its support for the DoD's decision "to reconsider a small number of factors" and said that it was likely "the fastest way to resolve all issues and quickly provide the needed modern technology to people across our armed forces".

Last month, a federal judge had ordered the Pentagon to stop Microsoft from starting work on the $10bn cloud computing project until Amazon's legal challenge is resolved.

Amazon was long seen as the front runner to win the contract until DoD announced in October that it was awarding the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, project to Microsoft.

Amazon protested the decision, saying it was unfairly treated in the bidding process. The company also claimed that President Donald Trump influenced the bidding process because of his antipathy towards Jeff Bezos, the owner of ecommerce giant Amazon and The Washington Post.

In November, Amazon filed a lawsuit in the US Court of Federal Claims challenging the DoD's decision.

Last month, Amazon urged the US Court of Federal Claims to tell the government to hand over internal Pentagon documents related to the JEDI cloud-services contract. The company said that it wanted to see documents pertaining to Defense Secretary Mark Esper's decision in September 2019 to recuse himself from making decisions on the cloud contract.

As per court documents, Amazon also urged the Court to force the government to release documents providing details of the role played by Stacy Cummings, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, in the JEDI contract process.