Leidos continues battle for HUD IT modernization contract

For at least a year, Leidos has been battling to hang on to a Housing and Urban Development IT modernization contract for over a year and the fight isn’t over yet.

Leidos and Perspecta are the incumbents on the existing contracts, which are being consolidated into a new requirement known as HUD Enterprise Architecture Transformation or HEAT. Perspecta has won the contract at least twice now and Leidos is protesting again.

An earlier protest resulted in a corrective action. But then Leidos protested the correction action because they argued that it was too narrow in scope. The Government Accountability Office rejected that protest, saying it was too soon to do so.

HUD has again awarded the contract to Perspecta, so Leidos filed a new protest late last week to argue was not conducted properly.

It seems like a lot of fuss for a contract valued at $147 million. But I question that value. Deltek data shows that several hundred million dollars of task orders have gone through the existing contract.

HUD is awarding HEAT as a task order through the CIO-SP3 contract. The agency wants to use it to modernize and transform its business and IT environment by using an enterprise IT approach. The winning contractor will provide end-user support, help desk, dashboard with real-time data feeds, project management and modernization of equipment.

The contract is expected to cover seven years.

Given everything that this contract has gone through to date, I would be surprised if we see another corrective action by HUD. One would think by now that they have fixed any problems that Leidos pointed out in its earlier protests.

This one might go to a full decision by GAO and that might have offer some keen insights into the competition between these two giants, which includes the battle for the Navy NGEN network services contract at the U.S. Court of Federal Claims that could see a summary judgment soon.