CACI’s $1.8B JIDO win won’t face bid protests
By
Nick Wakeman
CACI International can bank its $1.8 billion task order award to support the battle against improvised explosive devices now that its competitor has declined to file a bid protest.
Large contract wins often seem to be automatically protested especially when there are very few bidders but CACI International can breathe a sigh of relief over its $1.8 billion task order to support the Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Organization.
CACI only faced one competitor – AECOM -- for the task order the GSA OASIS contract and the company has decided not to protest JIDO’s decision. [There is some question about whether they could have protested even if they wanted to. See this blog post.]
Neither company is commenting. CACI said it cannot because they do not have permission from their customer to speak about the work.
What scant public information that is available describes the work as analytical operations, intelligence and training services.
A source told me that while technically the contract is a new vehicle, JIDO has actually consolidated several expiring contracts into a single task order. CACI apparently was able to pull many of the incumbents on those contracts on its team. AECOM was not an incumbent on any of the work, which may have placed it a disadvantage.
As I’ve tried to chase down information on this contract, I’ve found it remarkable that there has been next to nothing about such a large procurement in the public domain.
Because the work was competed under OASIS, you have to be an OASIS prime contractor holder to see any of the solicitation documents. But you’d think there would at least be an request of information posting or something on FBO.gov. But nada.
When the Defense Department announced the award Oct. 31 they said it was part of JIDO’s Enterprise Acquisition Strategy Initiative, but there is nothing on the JIDO website about such an initiative and JIDO’s press office has ignored requests for comment. GSA’s OASIS dashboard, which claims to be updated every night, hasn’t been any help either.
Can you tell I’m a bit bothered by this? After all this is a $1.8 billion contract. Shouldn’t there be some public scrutiny? I complained about this before.
But let’s set that aside for now. This is a huge win for CACI and even if they were an incumbent on some of the contracts that were rolled up, there is a lot of new work for the company. When they can talk, I’ll be curious to hear what kind of impact this will have on the company.
Apparently, CACI was positioned to take on this work through the Wexford Group, a company it acquired in 2007. According to Wexford’s website, it does a variety of work to combat improvised explosive devices, including training, embedded support and development of best practices.
The task order also is the largest single award contract CACI has won and now that there is no bid protest risk hanging over them, I'm sure there are some folks celebrating at CACI this week.