DHS faces protest over $150M consolidated IT contract
By
Nick Wakeman
DHS faces a protest over a $150 million IT contract that consolidated several other vehicles into a single award. Are more protests on the way?
The Homeland Security Department might be on the cusp of seeing a group of bid protests involving a $150 million contract that consolidated several other contracts into one single award vehicle.
The contract went to Java Productions to provide systems integration support to the DHS Information Sharing Environment Office. Java is not one of the six incumbents on various contracts DHS consolidated to create this contract.
Arc Aspicio LLC is one of those incumbents and has filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office questioning the decision to pick Java.
According to Deltek, DHS said it would award up to three contracts, but so far only one award had been made. Java received its award on Dec. 23. Arc Aspicio filed its protest on Dec. 31. A due date for a decision is April 11.
The contract is a blanket purchase agreement under the General Services Administration’s e-Buy program, so a lot of the solicitation documents are only available to Schedule 70 holders.
Other incumbents not making the cut at this stage include McKenna Principals, VariQ, and Lempugh Inc. So that makes three more potential protesters.
Booz Allen Hamilton and Deloitte also are incumbents but couldn’t bid on the BPA because DHS set it up as a small business contract. Of course, they could be teammates under a small business prime.
Generally, bidders have 10 days after receiving their debriefings to file a protest, so we’ll know in the next week or so if any of the other small businesses file or not.
Also, we’ll keep track as best we can to see if more awards are made.