Losing bidders complain about $7.8B Social Security IT awards

Unsurprisingly, the winners the Social Security Administration picked for its $7.8 billion IT Support Services Contract didn’t sit well with the losing bidders.

SSA chose Leidos, Northrop Grumman and CGI Federal in August for the contract. Each company has a slightly different ceiling over up to 10 years but all are over $2 billion.

CGI’s ceiling is $2.4 billion and Leidos' is $2.3 billion. Northrop has the largest ceiling at $3.1 billion.

Leidos is an incumbent through its acquisition of the former Lockheed Martin IT business last year, and Northrop is an incumbent as well.

But CSRA and Accenture were also incumbents and they lead a list of five bidders who filed protests with the Government Accountability Office.

Also protesting are Booz Allen Hamilton, IBM and DXC Technology. On the GAO docket, DXC is listed as Enterprise Services LLC, the legal name for the government business that came from HPE Enterprise Services when it merged earlier this year with Computer Sciences Corp. CSC spun out its U.S. public sector business and merged it with SRA International in 2015 to create CSRA, which is why CSRA is the incumbent.

According to the award announcement, the contract covers two years and up to eight option years.

SSA said it needs the IT support as it deals with the growing wave of retirements of Baby Boomers and the increased workload that is bringing.

Among the services are software development and web interfaces, databases and data administration, software engineering, systems administration and security.

All parts of SSA are expected to use the contract.

One source indicated to me that the protests could be driven in part on poor debriefings by SSA. That’s a common complaint we hear from companies. Agencies don’t give them enough information during the debrief for them to understand why they lost, so they have no choice but to protest.

The protests were filed Sept. 26 and 27. A decision from GAO is expected by Jan. 5.