Jeff Bezos spends a lot of time directing the newspaper he owns, The Washington Post, to criticize President Donald Trump in every way imaginable. But for some reason, the federal government cannot stop giving Amazon — the retail empire Bezos also owns — a slew of taxpayer-subsidized subsidies. Now, Congress is considering a new federal purchasing plan that could result in Amazon’s most lucrative government handout yet.
Buried deep in this year’s defense spending bill is a provision that would move Defense Department purchases of commercial off-the-shelf products to online marketplaces.
But it also calls for this platform to be designed to “enable government-wide use of such marketplaces.” This means the government is looking only for a procurement and supply management firm big enough to offer multiple suppliers for the same product with constantly changing selection and prices and serve the entire U.S. government.
That leaves just one likely possibility – Amazon Business – for basically monopoly control of $53 billion in federal purchasing, much of the supplies for which comes from no-bid contracts.
Amazon provides a platform for e-companies to sell through to their own customers. It receives 15 percent to 20 percent of the proceeds from such sales, which means a huge revenue stream for Amazon for doing basically nothing while vendors are forced to cough up as much as half their margin.
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