Air Force loses NetCents 2 protests

The Air Force just can’t seem to get clear of its NetCents 2 protest troubles.

This week, the Government Accountability Office recommended that the Air Force re-evaluate proposals for its $5.8 billion NetCents 2 small business contract for network operations and infrastructure solutions.

The Air Force made awards to 12 companies in March, and those awards were quickly followed by protests. [You should probably ignore my speculation in that one that the Air Force did something right with those March awards because only nine out of 17 losing bidders filed protests.]

GAO has now ruled on four of those protests. Decisions on the others are expected July 21 and 23.

This week’s decision involves protests by Intelligent Decisions, Abacus Technology, D&S Consultants, and CDO Technologies.

The full decision isn’t available as it is still going through the vetting process before being publicly released, but GAO did release a statement.

All of the companies challenged the Air Force’s evaluation of their respective proposals. Abacus and D&S also challenged the source selection decision.

GAO denied or dismissed the challenges raised by Intelligent Decisions and CDO Technologies.

But GAO sustained the challenges on the evaluation raised by D&S and it sustained the challenge to the source selection raised by Abacus and D&S.

So, the protesters and the Air Force each won some and lost some, but the bottom line is that GAO wants the Air Force to reevaluate proposals and make a new source selection.

It’s back to square one for this part of NetCents.

It’ll be interesting to see what GAO decides regarding the remaining protests filed by Pragmatics, Furtron, VMDn LLC and EMW Inc.

And to not muddy the waters, these protests and NetCents 2 awards are separate from the other NetCents 2 awards for application services that the Air Force announced this week.

We expect those awards also to be protested by losing bidders, of which there are several.

So, the Air Force’s NetCents 2 troubles continue. It begs the question, will we ever see all the components of this program up and running?

It doesn’t look good.