CSRA continues protest battle with CACI

A protest fight between CSRA Inc. and CACI International had its start nearly a year ago when SRA first protested an award to CACI to build a web-based supply chain management system.

The first protest goes back to last year when CACI first won the contract and SRA filed its protest. In April, when the Government Accountability Office told the General Services Administration to rethink its evaluation, GSA did just that, and sometime in December, it picked CACI a second time. Now, CSRA has filed another protest.

Officially, the protest docket reads SRA, but that company was merged into CSRA in late November when Computer Sciences Corp. spun off its government business and acquired SRA. So even though the official GAO docket reads SRA, I’m calling them CSRA.

In the first protest, which CSRA won, the company complained that GSA only held discussions with CACI, and GAO agreed. GSA then reopened the procurement, held discussions and re-evaluated proposals. It then made a new decision and award went again to CACI.

Details beyond that are very sparse. GAO made that decision in April, and usually, GAO releases a public version of the decision within several weeks. Each party in the protest has a chance to weigh in on what it thinks is appropriate to release and what isn’t.

But in this case, no public version has been released. GAO, CACI and CSRA are not commenting. A GSA press official is trying to track down a comment for me, but I’m not holding out much hope.

My only guess is that because the first protest only recommended that GSA re-evaluate proposals, GSA and the companies may have fought to keep most of the information out of the public eye because the competition was continuing.

The thought here was that too much information would compromise the competition.

We’ll have to watch what happens from here. Given that GSA took the first protest through the entire process, my gut tells me that this protest also will go all the way.

Perhaps then we’ll get a public version of the decision and learn what all the fuss was about.

But for now, this one is far from over.