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                                Commentary|BY TOM SCHATZ ispresidentofCitizens Against Government Waste.
A closer look at DOD’s cloudy JEDI contract
The Defense Department has taken the wrong path in its efforts to award its massive cloud procurement
   On July 26, the Defense Department released the final request for proposals for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud computing contract. The protracted process leading up to the RFP is
a lesson in how not to conduct procurement in the federal government.
JEDI is a multiyear effort to modernize DOD’s IT systems into
a cloud services solution. The contract has an estimated value
of $10 billion over 10 years, and
the winning company will be expected to deliver an enterprise- level commercial cloud solution
— including infrastructure as a service and platform as a service — to all defense agencies and military branches.
In February, the Army used its other transaction authority (OTA)
to award a sole-source, $950 million contract to REAN Cloud, a small Amazon Web Services provider, to assist with DOD’s cloud migration. The award was problematic from the beginning, most notably because the request for information indicated that it would be given to a single solution from a specific vendor,
and the platform appeared to be predetermined for the remaining JEDI cloud contract.
After the JEDI RFI was released in November 2017, IT Alliance for Public Sector Senior Vice President Trey Hodgkins told DOD that its cloud should consist of multiple interoperable offerings to provide competition and the “best value for
both the warfighter and taxpayer.” He added that the use of a single cloud provider would leave DOD “captive” to that provider. By contrast, using multiple providers would increase cybersecurity
and functionality, decrease costs by increasing competition and allow DOD to quickly adapt new technologies for warfighters.
Congress has granted 11 federal agencies the ability to use
The Pentagon must administer the JEDI contract in a fair, open and truly competitive manner.
OTA. Those agreements provide
an exception to the traditional procurement process that is to be used only when the agency’s needs cannot otherwise be met. However, many fear OTA is increasingly being used to bypass the traditional procurement process.
The $950 million REAN contract, which was awarded by the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, was so out of the ordinary that senior DOD officials were initially unaware of its existence. On March 5, the Pentagon reduced the scope of work and the contract award to $65 million.
The JEDI contracting process has been murky since its inception, moving from DIUx to DOD’s Cloud Executive Steering Group to the Defense Digital Service and finally to DOD CIO Dana Deasy.
After a DOD presentation on the JEDI contract to the IT industry
in March, IT Acquisition Advisory Council Executive Director John Weiler said, “The articulation of
the requirement and how this thing would be delivered is specific to Amazon. It is not a truly competitive procurement.”
In February, Oracle filed a bid protest with the Government Accountability Office, claiming that the Army improperly used its OTA in making the award. On May 31, GAO sustained Oracle’s protest.
The IT industry is not alone in its concerns about DOD relying on a single cloud provider. When the RFP was announced, Lt. Gen. VeraLinn “Dash” Jamieson, the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, said she did not want the Air Force to use only one cloud provider because a multicloud environment would give the enemy “a targeting problem.”
If the final JEDI contract is to avoid the wasteful and costly fate of past efforts to modernize federal IT, the Pentagon must administer the contract in a fair, open and truly competitive manner. So far, taxpayers have no reason to believe this critical procurement will have that outcome. n
TOM SCHATZ
      12 September/October 2018 FCW.COM





































































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