Biting The Hand That Feeds You In Space (Update)

Chamber of Commerce after Trump's Amazon attacks: 'Inappropriate' for officials to attack an American company, The Hill

"Neil Bradley, the executive vice president and chief policy officer of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, says it is "inappropriate" for government officials to use their offices to criticize American companies. "It's inappropriate for government officials to use their position to attack an American company," Bradley told The New York Times in an article published Tuesday. Bradley's comments came after President Trump launched a series of tweets over several days in which he accused tech giant Amazon of scamming the U.S. Postal Service and failing to collect taxes on some sales."

The Pentagon is close to awarding a $10 billion deal to Amazon despite Trump's tweets attacking the company, business Insider

"But behind the scenes, some Department of Defense agencies are so sure that Amazon will be awarded the contract that they are preparing for a transition to GovCloud, which is Amazon's cloud infrastructure designed specifically for government use, according to this source. And Safra Catz, the CEO of another Amazon cloud competitor, Oracle, dined Tuesday with Trump. Oracle is competing against Amazon for the JEDI contract. Catz complained to Trump during the dinner that the Pentagon's intent to award the contract to a single company made it difficult for anyone but Amazon to win the bidding process, according to Bloomberg."

Keith's note: We've already seen this sort of behavior from the White House intrude upon procurement for several large aerospace projects - Air Force One and F-35. It is inevitable that a space project will find itself similarly perturbed. This is not the sort of environment that should be created to encourage and support a growing space industry.