Chuck Grassley: “I come to the floor to give an update on my oversight work. I often speak on the floor about the importance of…”

“I come to the floor to give an update on my oversight work. I often speak on the floor about the importance of oversight. Now, my remarks today have some history that goes back from now back to 8 years ago, so it might not seem very important today, but I speak so the Defense Department won't make the same blunder they made over that period of time. That blunder I am talking about is the mess- up with the JEDI contract, a cloud contract. The parable of the vineyard tells us about corrupt tenants who tried to steal someone's harvest and keep it for themselves. It is especially bad, then, when public officials try to take the fruit of the taxpayers' vineyard for private gain. We can't ignore this sort of corruption or it will surely get worse. The 2019 planned Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract-- otherwise known as JEDI--was an attempt to move the entire Defense Department to cloud, meaning cloud computing, which happened to be a very, very expensive project. It was around $10 billion and was ultimately canceled, as it should have been. Ten billion dollars is a lot of tempting fruit, even by Washington, DC, standards. Early on, there were allegations that various Defense Department officials were helping the big corporation of Amazon behind the scenes to gain a contracting advantage. The allegations caused the inspector general of the Department of Defense to review the matter. My oversight work started in 2019.…”