A $10 billion deal to move all of the Defense Department's classified and unclassified data to the cloud appears to have been rigged in Amazon's favor, Vanity Fair has reported, and is yet another sign of the growing closeness between Jeff Bezos and Defense Secretary James Mattis.
The Defense Department's requests for proposals, officially called Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), was written with a "host of technical stipulations that only Amazon can meet," and put together only after Mattis hired Sally Donnelly, a lobbyist who had previously consulted for Amazon.
Vanity Fair noted that in several places, the language in JEDI mirrors Amazon's descriptions of its own technology, including the use of the phrase "ruggedized," which is how Amazon describes its Snowball Edge product. The requests for proposals also called for things that at the moment only Amazon provides, including "a distance of at least 150 miles between its data centers" and 32 GB of RAM.
During her time at her former lobbying firm SBD Advisors, which had Amazon Web Services as one of its clients, Donnelly became particularly close with Mattis. And although she sold her stake in SBD Advisors before being hired by Mattis, an "investment fund with ties to Amazon's cloud-computing unit" purchased SBD advisers while JEDI was being finalized.
According to Vanity Fair, Amazon has spend $67 million on lobbying since 2000, and this year alone spent more than "Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo combined." Amazon also employs numerous lobbyists who once held government positions. Last year, one such lobbyist, Anne Rung, helped secure Amazon as the "go-to portal for every online purchase the government makes--some $53 billion every year."
Vanity Fair concluded: "President Trump may enjoy firing off incendiary tweets attacking Amazon. But Bezos is quietly finding new ways to bolsters his empire with billions in federal tax dollars. And the Pentagon, it appears, is helping him do it."