Draining the Swamp the Trump way – JEDI
Is Donald Trump a Star Wars fan? I don’t know. What I know is that he promised to drain the DC swamp.
Of course, being a billionaire himself, all he did was watering it and even creating a new one himself with his family and friends in it.
But this is just peanuts compared to JEDI, which is about military might, but not about light sabers.
JEDI is short for Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure. It is the outsourcing of the US Defense Department’s server infrastructure into a private “cloud” (newspeak for “distributed servers you have no control over”).
This is a 10 Billion Dollar contract, and comes with a 1375 page spec document.
Of course laws mandate that offers have to be taken from everyone. But of course everyone knows there are ways around that, if you really want.
In the case of JEDI, the wording in the document looks like it was written by Amazon.
This would not be very surprising, since:
The lobbyist, Sally Donnelly, served as a top advisor to Defense Secretary Mattis while the details of JEDI were being hammered out. During her tenure, Mattis flew to Seattle to tour Amazon’s headquarters and meet with Jeff Bezos. Then, as the cloud-computing contract was being finalized, Donnelly’s former lobbying firm, SBD Advisors, was bought by an investment fund with ties to Amazon’s cloud-computing unit.
But how do you tailor a contract offer to a certain bidder?
To even make a bid, a provider must maintain a distance of at least 150 miles between its data centers, a prerequisite that only Amazon can currently meet.
Of course this would not be the only way Amazon profits from defense contracts.
Last year, working for Bezos, Rung helped pass the so-called Amazon amendment, a provision buried in a defense authorization bill that will establish Amazon as the go-to portal for every online purchase the government makes—some $53 billion every year.
Trump may not like Bezos, but he also does not – for whatever reason – do something against Bezo’s increasing influence. This swamp is getting deeper every day.
