Updated with Trump confirmation and letter from Republicans to Trump:

U.S. President Donald Trump today confirmed a Bloomberg report that he will take a look at the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure project, the $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract that has been shortlisted to Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

The president’s interest in the project is said to have come about after he was made aware of letters written by several Republican members of Congress and military leaders expressing concern over some companies being frozen out of the tendering process, specifically Oracle Corp.

“I never had something where more people are complaining,” Trump told a press pool at the White House today. He added that will take take a close look at the deal. “We’re getting tremendous complaints from other companies,” he said. “Some of the greatest companies in the world are complaining about it,” in particular Microsoft, Oracle and IBM Corp.

Oracle took its exclusion from the tendering process to court in December, arguing that the JEDI bidding process unfairly favors its rivals in the cloud market. The case was subsequently dismissed by the Federal Claims Court July 12.

Trump’s interest in the letters come via Senate Homeland Security Chairman Ron Johnson, who said in an interview that he discussed it with the president aboard Air Force One last week. “He wanted to understand what the issues were, what our concerns were,” Johnson is quoted as saying.

Senator Marco Rubio, who wrote letter to National Security Adviser John Bolton calling on the JEDI contract to be delayed on competition grounds, is also said to have spoken to the president on the matter.

All that said, opposition to the deal is hardly universal in Congress, even among Republicans. According to a letter (below) obtained by SiliconANGLE, four Republicans — Mac Thornberry of Texas, Elise Stefanik of New York, Michael R. Turner of Ohio and Robert J. Wittman of Virginia — wrote a letter to Trump Thursday calling for the deal to be awarded “as quickly as possible.”

“Moving to the cloud will help DOD operate faster, more efficiently, and compete with adversaries, like China,” they wrote. “While it is understandable that some of the companies competing for the contract are disappointed at not being selected as one of the finalists, further unnecessary delays will only damage our security and increase the costs of the contract.”

President Trump has taken no action other than simply looking into it, but there’s concern that any involvement may be swayed by the president’s dislike of Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive officer of Amazon.com Inc. AWS, as the largest cloud infrastructure provider in the U.S., is favored to win the JEDI contract.

Clouding matters further, Oracle co-Chief Executive Officer Safra Catz was a member of Trump’s presidential transition team in 2016 and is said to have dined privately with the president in 2018 where the JEDI contract was discussed.

As The Register pointed out, however, “it is yet to be seen how these vendettas and relationships would impact Trump’s thinking on the matter – or if they would even factor in to the President’s decision making at all. Still, it probably doesn’t hurt to be on Trump’s good side.”

Presuming there is no intervention from the White House, the JEDI contract is expected to be awarded by the end of August.

Photo: White House