Womack renews objections to JEDI cloud

At a May 1 funding hearing, Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.) told the acting defense secretary that he wants the Pentagon to consider multicloud options for the $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure program.

"Why does your department continue with what I believe to be an ill-conceived strategy on a single … vendor JEDI cloud program?" Womack asked acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan at an Appropriations subcommittee hearing. "There has been a down select to two organizations. That in my strong opinion continues a disturbing pattern of limiting competition on a program that is … potentially, extremely expensive."

After an internal conflict of interest probe, the Defense Department recently announced that Amazon Web Services and Microsoft are the finalists for the massive cloud infrastructure contract. The probe occurred as an outgrowth of a lawsuit against the JEDI program brought by vendor Oracle. That lawsuit was paused is still ongoing.

In response, Shanahan downplayed JEDI, saying it is one project amid a much larger push to modernize defense technology -- a push that includes multiple cloud programs.

"Across the department there is a proliferation in terms of implementing clouds. Everyone was moving to the cloud," Shanahan said. "The JEDI competition is about creating a pathway so that we can move as a department on a small scale. This isn't wholesale. It sometimes gets advertised as this is winner-take-all. This is winner-take-all for a very small subset of the amount of cloud infrastructure we are going to have to build out over time."

This isn't the first time Womack has aimed barbs at the DOD's controversial $10 billion cloud program. In October 2018, Womack joined fellow appropriator Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) in a letter urging an inspector general probe into the procurement, alleging that the security requirements seemed tailor-made to support one vendor -- Amazon Web Services.

Womack noted in the hearing that the intelligence community recently issued a solicitation that included plans to move to a more diverse cloud environment.

"It is clear that multivendor cloud environments are widely used … by large organizations for a simple reason. They increase competition. They improve security and capability and they provide cost savings. And in an environment like we're in right now, I would assume that would be a key issue for a Department of Defense," Womack said.