Another round of protests for $1.6B Justice IT contract

A $1.6 billion Justice Department IT contract continues to run into protest troubles as the agency tries to finalize awards.

This is the fifth iteration of DOJ’s IT Support Services contract. DOJ released the final solicitation in February 2017 with proposals due in June 2017. Since then, there have been several pre-award protests and we are now in our second set of post-award protests. There also was a pair of cases before the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.

Part of the discord was DOJ’s two-step process. Several of the protests by companies such as Leidos, IntelliDyne and ManTech International stemmed from their elimination after step one. The Government Accountability Office denied the protests as did the court when Leidos and ManTech took their complaints there.

DOJ then made awards to five companies -- Booz Allen Hamilton, CACI International, SRA (which is now part of General Dynamics), NTT Data Federal Services, and Ace Info Solutions (now part of Dovel Technologies).

But then more protests were filed by Perspecta and MetroStar Systems. Those protests were filed in January and this time DOJ earned a split decision with GAO denying Perspecta’s protest but agreeing with MetroStar Systems

The MetroStar decision sent DOJ back to re-evaluate proposals and the department recently came back with seven winners -- the same five chosen before, but this time MetroStar and BAE Systems earned spots on the vehicle as well, according to Deltek.

Now Perspecta has filed a new protest as has Qbase LLC. Decisions from GAO are expected in mid-November.

The ITSS series of contracts cover wide range of IT services that fall into six broad functional areas such as IT planning and architecture, program management, systems engineering, infrastructure support and operations and maintenance.

DOJ successfully made a group of small business awards for ITSS V in 2018.