The Capitol Forum, a DC-based publication totally unaffiliated in any way with the Institute for Liberty, published a terrific article raising concerns about the decisionmaking process for contracting over the JEDI program on May 30, 2018.

The piece is titled, JEDI: Pentagon Staff Helping Decide Contract Winner Lacks Expertise, Could Be Biased, Report Says,"  and it begins as follows:

"The Pentagon staff who will help decide which company wins the multibillion-dollar JEDI contract to convert the Defense Department’s computer network to the cloud lacks “any real expertise” in this area, according to a report from an information technology group that’s an experienced DOD consultant.

"The report, produced by the IT Acquisition Advisory Council (IT-AAC) and obtained by The Capitol Forum, further alleges that a key member of the staff, Chris Lynch, founder and director of the Defense Digital Service (DDS), has made public statements and accepted speaking engagements promoting Amazon Web Services (AWS) that indicate a bias toward the cloud provider and against its rivals.  The IT-AAC accepts money from tech companies, including Amazon (AMZN) rivals.

"The report mentions some of Lynch’s potential conflicts of interest, which The Capitol Forum highlighted in a May 11 article, and amplifies concerns about the Trump administration’s process for selecting cloud providers. The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract, valued at more than $1 billion over the next five years, is raising questions with lawmakers."

The rest of the article is similarly well-written, tremendously informative, and can be found at the Capitol Forum website.  Please subscribe to them!