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While this does seem like an insiders rigged game, is that necessarily bad? Business is about relationships. It’s has always been this way and will always conti

While this does seem like an insiders rigged game, is that necessarily bad? Business is about relationships. It’s has always been this way and will always continue to be this way. People do business with people they know and like. While the govt is not technically a business as such, awarding a contract is still a business transaction. If the DOD know and trust people at amazon to do a good job, then why shouldn’t amazon get the contract? AWS is an industry leader (if not the leader? Somebody correct me) who obviously knows a great deal about doing a project of this magnitude. It seems to me they would probably do as good a job as any of the other candidates (which seems to be realistically azure or google cloud) so I don’t really see why this is a bad thing. TLDR: amazon knows people at dod, they decide to do business together, who cares?

objectivetruth 8y ago
It seems like you're asking "why have any sort of accountability in awarding a transaction worth $10 billion of taxpayer money?" Here is how corruption works: Many, many years ago, I was a contract mainframe technician and I worked on local government systems. One day, a colleague offered me a deal: he'd make sure I got a $10,000 contract for a very easy gig with a local city government, but I had to give him $2,000 and I had to give the city government purchaser $2,000. So I'd clear $6,000 for a weekend's work. (The $4,000 bribes are called "kickbacks" if you've heard that phrase before in news stories about public corruption trials.) Now if you think that's an OK way to spend taxpayer money, you need to take an ethics class. (Hint: it's not OK, because an ethical city purchaser would have contracted it out for a much cheaper price and not tried to wet his beak.) Obviously I said no. Now, scale that $4,000 corruption loss on a $10,000 project up to a TEN BILLION DOLLAR project. You ask "who cares?" I reply: everyone who pays US taxes and especially everyone who follows the anti-corruption procurement practices.

objectivetruth 8y ago

It seems like you're asking "why have any sort of accountability in awarding a transaction worth $10 billion of taxpayer money?" Here is how corruption works: Many, many years ago, I was a contract mainframe technician and I worked on local government systems. One day, a colleague offered me a deal: he'd make sure I got a $10,000 contract for a very easy gig with a local city government, but I had to give him $2,000 and I had to give the city government purchaser $2,000. So I'd clear $6,000 for a weekend's work. (The $4,000 bribes are called "kickbacks" if you've heard that phrase before in news stories about public corruption trials.) Now if you think that's an OK way to spend taxpayer money, you need to take an ethics class. (Hint: it's not OK, because an ethical city purchaser would have contracted it out for a much cheaper price and not tried to wet his beak.) Obviously I said no. Now, scale that $4,000 corruption loss on a $10,000 project up to a TEN BILLION DOLLAR project. You ask "who cares?" I reply: everyone who pays US taxes and especially everyone who follows the anti-corruption procurement practices.