Supreme Court Won’t Revive Oracle JEDI Contract Challenge

The U.S. Supreme Court said Monday it won’t review Oracle America Inc.'s claim that the Department of Defense’s $10 billion cloud procurement known as JEDI was unreasonably restricted to one vendor and tainted by conflicts of interest.

Oracle argued in its review petition that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit erroneously found that the DOD’s improper single source approach constituted “harmless error” that didn’t affect Oracle’s elimination from the competition.

Oracle also faulted the Federal Circuit for concluding that “criminal conflicts of interest” involving Amazon employees didn’t render JEDI unenforceable because they didn’t materially affect the procurement.

DOD canceled the procurement in July 6, and terminated Microsoft’s contract award Sept. 1. The government asserted Sept. 8 that the petition should be rejected because the protest was moot.

The government had also argued that Oracle wasn’t prejudiced by any DOD error because the company’s failure to satisfy security requirements meant it didn’t have a substantial chance of winning a contract even if DOD conducted a multiple source solicitation.

Amazon, which also protested Microsoft’s award, said the petition should be denied because the alleged conflicts of interest concerned DOD employees, not Amazon.

The alleged conflicts were highly fact-bound, and had no effect on Oracle’s exclusion from the competition, Amazon also said.

Oracle, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft submitted bids for the JEDI contract. DOD eliminated Oracle’s bid for failing to satisfy cloud capacity requirements, and Oracle protested.

The U.S. Court of Federal Claims rejected the protest in July 2019, ruling that Oracle didn’t meet the criteria for the bid and couldn’t demonstrate prejudice from possible errors.

The Federal Circuit affirmed in September 2020.

DOD awarded the contract to Microsoft in October 2019 and Amazon protested at the claims court. The DOD agreed to reconsider a portion of its award decision but then affirmed the award to Microsoft.

The claims court dismissed Amazon’s protest for mootness in July.

Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP represented Oracle. Crowell & Moring LLP and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP represented Amazon.

The case is Oracle Am. Inc. v. United States, U.S., No. 20-1057, 10/4/21.