DOD internal investigation finds DOD handled JEDI contract properly

Enlarge / An aerial view of the Pentagon, the Potomac river, and parts of Washington, DC, taken back before a pandemic started keeping most of those cars in the commuter lot at home. (credit: Matthew Borkoski Photograpy | Getty Images )

The Department of Defense's internal probe into a controversial $10 billion cloud-computing contract concluded that the process by which the contract was awarded was proper and not influenced by President Donald Trump or members of his administration—despite the fact that the White House declined to cooperate with the investigation.

The DOD Office of Inspector General circulated the report (a 317-page PDF) on the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract (JEDI) award internally on Monday and made it public today. In the end, the inspectors determined that the evidence showed DOD personnel who made the decision were neither pressured by the White House directly nor by senior DOD officials who may have been in communication with the White House, even though "media swirl" made it seem otherwise.

Many enterprise computing vendors threw their hats in the ring for the JEDI contract. By April 2019, the shortlist was down to two finalists: Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. Industry experts and observers largely expected Amazon to win the contract and were generally surprised when the Pentagon sealed the deal with Microsoft in October.