No, this blog is not about Star Wars and the cute new toy Yoda. JEDI is the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract potentially worth $10 billion over 10 years, awarded to Microsoft to provide cloud services to the DoD. There currently are two cases in the Court of Federal claims concerning this acquisition. Oracle takes issue with the single-award structure of the contract, arguing that acquisition regulations require a contract of this size to be a multi-award. But they have also centered their argument around conflict-of-interest allegations against former AWS employees who worked for the DoD during the JEDI cloud procurement. They have appealed an initial decision by the court that Oracle does not have standing to claim it was wronged in the JEDI procurement process because it did not meet the contract requirements.
The second protest is a complaint filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, where Amazon said the president “launched repeated public and behind-the-scenes attacks” on the contract and the company to steer the contract away from Amazon, according to the complaint, which was made public Monday. Amazon is arguing that the president violated the integrity of the source selection process.
Contracts of this size get much more attention from the leadership in Washington than the contract awards made daily by the Federal Government. The issue is the integrity of the process, regardless of the value of the contract. I would like to see you all post response to this blog that reflects your level of trust in the source selection process.
As a contracting officer for 30 plus years, I saw the acquisition rules change 10 times over, under the guise of reform, to streamline and make the process more transparent. When I retired 5 years ago, I viewed the process as so micromanaged out of fear of making a selection that GAO would overturn, that the source selection process was no longer efficient. The outcome was correct, but the time and energy getting there would not be called efficient.
Let’s get to Amazon’s claim that the chief executive reached down and directed an award. I will not get into politics, but senior leadership at many levels will express opinions on requirements and the needs of the agency in public forums. Those statements could be construed as directing the outcome of any award. However, the source selection process is so rigid and documented as to who has knowledge of and evaluation of offers that demonstrating that there was outside influence is going to be difficult for Amazon to prove.
What will happen will be a review of the source selection process by the court to make sure the award decision followed the evaluation criteria. Unless the court can prove that the evaluation was flawed, Amazon will not see their protest sustained. As a contracting officer, I saw the bid protest process used by industry to hopefully find a flaw that GAO could send the award back for corrective action giving the losing offeror a second chance. Amazon is doing that in filing the protest with the courts. It is a bit unusual not to file a protest with GAO before going to Court of Claims, but it is an acceptable avenue to protest an award.
Steve,
I am surprised that the DOD allowed the single award IDIQ approach for several reasons.
1) Being locked into one source for a LONG time (10 years) can be a risky approach. It is NOT one I liked as a KO. While on one hand the “winner take all” approach can drive more interest…that only last until they win in my experience. Once the one winner has the contract, the “influence” tended to shift to the contactor.
I had this happen in a product contract, a services contract, and most painfully in two software development contracts. Managing the program after award was painful at best because I, as the KO, had no (ok, little) leverage to help my customer take advantage of competition after award. As a result, every innovation, every change, every improvement was more difficult to initiate, took longer to get done, and cost more. While a multiple award IDIQ did not make sense in all of these cases (they were not all for commercial services after all), it does seem to make sense in the case of JEDI.
2) In order to award a single award IDIQ, the KO has to get approval (from the Head of the Agency). That requirement to write a Determination and Findings (D&F) is in FAR 16.504(c)(1)(ii)(D)). Plus the HOA has to notify Congress. Assuming all this happened as part of the acquisition plan, this is NOT the path of least resistance. The few things that I had to get approved by the HOA (or even the HCA) were often so laborious that we found a different way to solve the problem.
We will see how this shakes out I suppose…but my Spidey senses tell me that the future of cloud services is going to multiple award.