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President Trump said Thursday that the administration would "consider at length" a gigantic multibillion-dollar deal that the Pentagon is preparing to pbad for a cloud computing system, citing "huge complaints." "of which he has been informed.
Amazon Web Services, a division of Amazon, and Microsoft The contract finalists are estimated at $ 10 billion over a decade.
Trump said at an event at the White House that companies that are no longer vying for approval, referred to as Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, have filed complaints about the process.
Republican lawmakers troubled by the Pentagon's treatment of the contract also expressed their concerns directly to the president.
"I get a lot of complaints about the contract with the Pentagon and Amazon," Trump said when he was questioned about it when he appeared before the Dutch prime minister. "They say it was not a competitive offer."
"We are looking at this very seriously," said the president. "It's a very big contract, one of the biggest ever with the cloud and many other things."
Trump said that some of the "biggest companies in the world" were among those complaining about Amazon. He added that the administration would review the contract "very closely" because "I have very few things for which such complaints have occurred".
Trump is a reviewer of Amazon, the e-commerce retailer owned by Jeff Bezos. Bezos also has The Washington Post and Trump criticized the newspaper's coverage of the administration.
The president's comments have injected new uncertainty into a project deemed essential by the Department of Defense to maintain the technological advantage of the US military over its opponents. Whatever the winning company, the contract will have the monumental task of storing and processing large amounts of clbadified data. The Pentagon says it will allow troops to advance the use of artificial intelligence in the war.
Oracle and IBM were eliminated from a previous round of the competition, leaving Amazon and Microsoft among the two finalists.
In a statement released Thursday, IBM said "worry about JEDI's procurement structure for a long time" and continue to believe that the Department of Defense "would be better served by a multi-cloud strategy" involving multiple cloud systems operated by different companies. .
Last week, a federal judge launched a second Oracle challenge, alleging that the bid process was rigged in favor of Amazon, and some members of Congress raised concerns about potential conflicts of interest.
Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida sent a letter last week to the national security advisor of the White House John Bolton asking the Pentagon to delay awarding the contract, believing that the process was suffering from a "lack of competition" and the use of "arbitrary criteria and standards for bidders" that could squander the contract; 39, taxpayers' money and "do not provide our fighters the best technological solutions". Rubio also raised concerns about single-sourcing projects.
The Pentagon has announced its intention to award the contract as of August 23.
Congressman James Langevin, a Rhode Island Democrat sitting on the House of Armed Forces Committee, said Thursday that he had full confidence in the Department of Defense's cloud strategy and that it was important to let the project move forward.
Langevin said in an e-mail that "it would be" totally inappropriate "that Trump or a congressman takes offense in the procurement process, especially as the courts and the court of law. 39 Office of Government Responsibility – the watchdog of Congress – rejected the challenges of the Pentagon projects.
Daniel Goure, vice president of the Lexington Institute, a Virginia-based, defense-focused think tank, said it was not unusual for Trump to publicly voice his concerns about a deal. Defense equipment, as Trump had done a few weeks before taking office with Boeing version of Air Force One.
But Goure said it was rare for Trump to overturn a Pentagon ruling, particularly a decision backed by a legal opinion.
"I would be extremely surprised that the President decides to unilaterally rescind this decision," said Goure, whose institute receives funding from Amazon. "I think that once he sees the process or the process will be explained to him and the document will be explained to him, I think it will all go away."
AP
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