DHS sees a different kind of contract for next Eagle vehicle

The Homeland Security Department's Eagle 2 contract for IT services expires in 2020 and expects the replacement for the $22 billion vehicle to look different than the current version.

Soraya Correa, the Homeland Security Department's chief procurement officer, said Friday at the Washington Technology DHS Industry Day that the department is exploring its options for the next iteration of Eagle or Enterprise Acquisition Gateway for Leading Edge Solutions 2.

“I see the future of Eagle 3 being very different from what Eagle 2 looks like today,” she said. But she cautioned that whatever succeeds Eagle 2 should not be considered a strict “recompete” in the traditional sense. DHS may even drop the name Eagle for the next iteration.

As Correa pointed out, the General Services Administration and Office of Management and Budget have in recent years created “best-in-class” contract vehicles for agencies to use as their preferred mechanism for services acquisitions.

GSA has designed its $50 billion Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions contract for telecommunications services as best-in-class, a group includes other contracts such as OASIS and Alliant.

It could very well be that DHS decides to migrate the work that would have been performed under an Eagle 3 contract to one of the best-in-class vehicles, Correa said.

“If there is a best-in-class procurement that fulfills the need we’re going to go to that first. We’re not going to sit here and write another vehicle that replicates what’s already out there. That’s inefficient, that’s ineffective,” she said.

DHS in fact signed onto the OASIS contract three years ago to join the Army and Air Force as users of that vehicle. DHS had already started to use OASIS to award work against the Technical, Acquisition and Business Support Services contract.

Whichever path DHS chooses, Correa said an Eagle 2 successor is “probably going to be a combined procurement” of that and the $1.5 billion FLASH agile services contract cancelled last year after protests derailed it.

“It’s probably going to be a little more uniquely tailored to DHS in terms of what we’re going to need to be doing now and in the future,” Correa said, because “I am mindful of making sure that we’re creating solutions that are really targeted to fulfill the needs of our organizations."