VA inches closer to T4NG on-ramp awards

The Veterans Affairs Department can now move forward with the on-ramp for its T4NG vehicle with protests now out of the way.

On-ramp awards for the Veterans Affairs Department's $22.3 billion T4NG contract vehicle might be moving forward, a little bit anyway.

Four companies had filed protests when they were eliminated from the on-ramp. Two of those companies -- Tucker-Rose Associates and One Federal Solution Corp. -- withdrew their protests in late March and early April, most likely after reading the VA’s response to their protests.

But the other two forged on, until this week when the protests filed by MicroHealth and Ironclad Technology Services were dismissed. That can be seen as something of a victory for those service-disabled, veteran-owned small businesses.

The dismissals mean that the VA saw something in their protests that indicated there was a problem on VA’s side of the equation. Now the VA is taking action to correct the problem.

MicroHealth and Ironclad objected to being eliminated from the competition because the VA claimed they didn’t follow instructions on how to prepare their proposals. This corrective action essentially lets the two companies back into the competition.

Known as the Transformation Twenty-One Total Technology vehicle, T4NG is the VA's main contract to acquire a wide-range of IT services in several functional areas such as program management, systems engineering, cybersecurity and training.