Supreme Court declines to hear Oracle challenge to Pentagon’s JEDI contract

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear Oracle’s suit challenging how the Pentagon awarded its now canceled $10 billion cloud computing contract.

The Supreme Court said it won’t review Oracle’s appeal of a federal court ruling that found that the software company was not hurt by any errors the Pentagon made in awarding the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, as Oracle would not have qualified for it.

The Defense Department in 2019 awarded the potential $10 billion cloud computing project to Microsoft but was forced to cancel the effort in July after the program became mired in legal battles.

For the next iteration of the program, known as the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC), the Pentagon plans to split the work between multiple companies, potentially Microsoft and Amazon.

Oracle in 2018 first sued to protest the Pentagon’s intention to award the lucrative contract to a single company. It also alleged that several DOD employees had conflicts of interest involving Amazon, which also sought the award.

But the Washington-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit last year said any conflicts didn’t irrevocably hurt the contracting process and that Oracle wasn’t hurt because the company never had a chance of winning the award.

Though JEDI has since been axed, Oracle wanted the highest court to hear its appeal to make sure that its concerns over JEDI do not reoccur in the JWCC contract process.

“Cases do not become moot simply because a defendant issues a press release claiming to have ceased its misconduct,” Oracle argued in a brief filed to the Supreme Court in September.

“The department states its intent to replace JEDI with another similar cloud-computing contract; to presumptively award the contract to Microsoft and respondent Amazon Web Services as the ‘only’ eligible competitors; and to exclude other bidders based on infected research and requirements drawn directly from the challenged procurement,” the company added.