In a FLASH, DHS faces protest troubles

The Homeland Security Department apparently has a bit of a mess on its hands with its $1.5 billion FLASH contract.

Twice it has tried to make awards and twice it has been met with protests from unhappy, losing bidders.

The small business vehicle is to be used by the department to create digital services. They named 13 winners in November and were quickly hit by bid protests.

That led to a corrective action by DHS and the pulling back of the original contract awards. The Government Accountability Office followed suit and dismissed the protests.

That’s all pretty normal but then DHS made new awards earlier this month but this time it only named 11 awards. Two of the previous winners failed to make the cut this time.

Missing from the list was EDC Consulting and Emagine IT.

EDC Consulting has filed a protest with GAO. So far Emagine IT has not.

The other protesters all were in the group that filed in December – Billient Corp., Cybermedia Technologies, Harmonia Holdings Group, and Incentive Technology Group.

It is very unusual in multiple award contracts to drop companies once they’ve won a spot. Generally, you see agencies add companies or fight to keep the original group.

It’ll be interesting to see where DHS is headed with this one.

As it stands now the winners of the contract are:

• Ad Hoc LLC
• Excella Consulting Inc.
• Innovations JV LLC
• Karsun Solutions
• LinkTec
• Navitas Business Consulting Inc.
• SemanticBits LLC
• SimonComputing Inc.
• Soft Tech Consulting Inc.
• Solution Technology Systems Inc.
• Wexler Technical Solutions Inc.

Once the contract is up and running the small business primes will compete for task orders for services such as support for collaboration efforts, code development, integration support, data migration, DevOps, configuration management, user training and metrics reporting.

The contract, which is officially known as the Flexible Agile Support for the Homeland contract, but sounds much cooler as FLASH, was created in response to the federal CIO’s digital government strategy.