Northrop joins fight over $1.6B Justice IT contract

The protest pool grows as Northrop Grumman formally makes its own objections involving the Justice Department's $1.6 billion IT Support Services 5 contract.

The protest pool involving a $1.6 billion Justice Department IT support contract has a new member after Northrop Grumman filed its objection with the Government Accountability Office.

Northrop Grumman is an incumbent on DOJ’s IT Support Services 4 contract, but this is the first protest it has filed for not making the cut for ITSS 5.

DOJ originally made five awards to large businesses: Booz Allen Hamilton, CACI International, SRA (now part of General Dynamics), NTT Data Federal Services, and Ace Info Solutions (now part of Dovel Technologies.)

This contract has gone through several rounds of protests and court challenges through its two-step evaluation process. DOJ re-evaluated bids, then made awards to those original five plus MetroStar (a protester) and BAE Systems for the second attempt.

As we reported earlier this week, new protests were filed by Perspecta and Qbase LLC after their exclusion from awards. A decision on Northrop's protest expected from GAO in mid-November.

The ITSS series of contracts covers 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.