JEDI award gets reconsideration and 120-pause

The Defense Department wants some time to it “reconsider” parts of its decision to award its $10 billion cloud contract to Microsoft and has asked the U.S. Court of Federal Claims for a 120-day pause. Amazon Web Services has taken DOD and by extension, Microsoft, to court to overturn DOD’s decision on the Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative contract.

In approving an injunction to stop work on JEDI, Judge Patricia Campbell-Smith said AWS was likely to win its protest because of issues with how DOD evaluated 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 it might allow AWS and Microsoft to make amendments, but only to factors 5 and 9 under Price Scenario 6.

DOD also wants to reconsider its evaluation of the AWS and Microsoft online marketplace offerings along with “its award decision in response to the other technical challenges presented by AWS,” according to DOD’s motion. 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 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 Donald 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.

This article was first posted to Washington Technology, a sibling site to Defense Systems.