The Pentagon has reached a deal with Amazon worth $10 billion for the tech company's cloud computer services, but critics are saying the deal wasn't made in taxpayers' best interest.
Even though the Intelligence Community and the Department of Homeland Security determined that multiple cloud vendors was preferable to a single vendor, the Department of Defense decided to award Amazon the entire lucrative contract.
The Swamp rears its ugly head in the form of a man employed at different times by both the Department of Defense and Amazon. Fox News reports:
A legal battle waged by Oracle centers on the Defense Department's Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), which aims to award a $10 billion contract for cloud computing. Oracle alleges in a complaint filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims that it is unwise for the government to use only one cloud service, and that the process was rigged from the beginning due to connections between Amazon and DoD officials.
"In a fair and lawful competition, Oracle would have a substantial chance for a JEDI contract award," the company said in its filing.
Oracle, in its complaint, points to the involvement of former DoD employee Deap Ubhi, who worked at Amazon before joining the DoD in August 2016. Ubhi is now at Amazon once again, with Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) -- the entity that handles cloud computing.
Oracle claims that Ubhi was a project manager for JEDI and pushed for the Pentagon to use a single vendor for cloud computing, despite the Intelligence Community and the Department of Homeland Security each determining that multiple cloud vendors are preferable.
A Convention of States can't eliminate corruption and backroom dealing -- no political solution can address those problems completely.
But the reason we see so many swampy deals go down in D.C. is because so much power is concentrated inside the beltway. With $10 billion on the table, it's no wonder companies, politicians, and bureaucrats will use any means necessary to line their pockets and complete the deal.
An Article V Convention of States can dilute this power by proposing constitutional amendments that return much of it back to the states. With power spread across all 50 state legislatures, corrupt actors will have less ability to strike deals that affect the entire country.
Even more importantly, where corruption does exist, We the People will be a better position to address it. Average Americans don't have much influence in D.C. At their state capitols, on the other hand, men and women can enact real change -- as we've seen in the 15 state legislatures that have passed the Convention of States resolution.
The Swamp is a serious problem, but we can't rely on D.C. to fix it. We have to look outside the nation's capital, and we can do it with an Article V Convention of States.
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