Two top congressional Republicans said Tuesday that Amazon should appear "under oath" to testify about how it used its connections to the Pentagon as it competed for the now-scuttled JEDI cloud contract.
Amazon appears to have "used its market power and paid-for connections to circumvent ethical boundaries and avoid competition in an attempt to win this contract," said Sen. Mike Lee and Rep. Ken Buck in a statement, even though the ecommerce giant lost out to Microsoft on the $10 billion contract in 2019. The Defense Department canceled the controversial award earlier in July.
Lee and Buck, who are respectively the top GOP members of the Senate and House antitrust subcommittees, were responding to a New York Times report that used internal emails to show department praise for Amazon and connections between officials.
"Now, more than ever, we need to ask Amazon, under oath, whether it tried to improperly influence the largest federal contract in history," Lee and Buck said.
Amazon — alongside other Big Tech giants like Google and Facebook — has been under harsh bipartisan scrutiny in Washington over its competitive practices.
Climate TRACE's data show emissions at the facility-level.Image: Climate TRACE