GD loses chance to defend incumbent contract

General Dynamics was dealt a serious blow in its attempt to hang onto to a $140 million IT services contract when the Government Accountability Office ruled against its bid protest.

GD One Source LLC is the incumbent on the Technology Operations and Maintenance Infrastructure Support contract with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service. The Homeland Security Department contract has been worth over $130 million to GD since the company won the vehicle in 2011.

Deltek is estimating that the new contract will be worth $143.9 million over three years.
 
For the recompete, DHS is using the Alliant contract and GD was eliminated from the competitive range during the evaluation process, which led the company to file its protest with GAO. [CLARIFICATION: An earlier version of this blog incorrectly implied that GD was eliminated because DHS was using the Alliant contract.]

A GD spokesman declined to comment on the contract or on the GAO decision.

Also eliminated from the competition were Harris Corp. and HP Enterprise Services. GAO also denied Harris’ protest. HP withdrew its protest before GAO rendered a decision.

I’m not sure why HP withdrew. They either were let back into the competition or decided a protest wasn’t worth their time.

A request for comment from HP was not immediately available.

Any time an incumbent loses a competition, it’s a blow, particularly when the contract brings in $40 million a year.

It has to be an even sharper sting when the company doesn’t even make it to the final round of the competition.

Under this contract, USCIS gets IT support for its locations throughout the U.S. and at 30 overseas locations. Work supports account management, service desk, field services, service center services and hardware incident resolution as the agency manages immigration services such as visa and naturalization petitions and asylum and refugee applications.

It might be a few weeks before GAO releases a public version of its decision. We’ll have more insights then into why DHS decided to eliminate GD and Harris.

Another unresolved question is who is left in the running for the contract? Deltek expects the contract to be awarded this month, so we’ll know the answer pretty soon.