Pentagon Says it Needs ‘More Time’ Fixing JEDI Contract

In updated legal filings, the Defense Department said it will not be in a position to award its Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract to either Microsoft or Amazon Web Services until at least August 17.

The June 16 filing comes more than six months after AWS first challenged the Pentagon’s October award of the $10 billion contract to Microsoft in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, which resulted in the Pentagon pulling the contract to take corrective action on identified flaws.

According to the filing, both companies submitted revised JEDI proposals in May, but they’ll have to revise and submit bids once more because the Pentagon intends to issue another amendment to the JEDI solicitation by June 22.

“DoD continues to evaluate the offerors’ revised proposals, and more time is required to complete this process,” attorneys for the Defense Department said in the filing. “DoD now anticipates that another solicitation amendment will be necessary, and additional limited proposal revisions will be permitted.”

The filing indicates the Defense Department expects to receive new proposals by July 6 and intends to evaluate revised proposals by August 17. However, “it is possible that some additional time may be necessary,” attorneys for the Defense Department said.

JEDI is considered one of the Pentagon’s most high-profile technology contracts in years and through it officials hope to link together worldwide military systems at all classification levels from various military departments into a single, unified architecture. DoD officials have also repeatedly said that an enterprise cloud is essential to advance the department’s artificial intelligence projects. However, the contract has been protested four times and is approximately two years behind schedule.

The bid protest filed by AWS remains on hold following the judge’s order for the Defense Department to take corrective action on JEDI. AWS’ protest alleged the Defense Department made material errors evaluating the companies’ bids and also alleged President Trump improperly influenced Pentagon’s decision-making. Thus far, the judge has not addressed allegations of improper political influence.