How an administration change drove EPA to cancel research contract

A change in priorities and leadership from the Trump administration to the Biden administration led the Environmental Protection Agency to cancel a contract for economic research and analysis.

EPA developed the contract under the Trump administration and the competition carried over into the Biden administration. But after proposals were submitted and evaluations happened, the technical evaluation committee chair sent an email to the contracting specialist raising questions about the solicitation.

“We think that our expanded climate change analytic requirements are not going to be met by the [vendor] in line for award,” the chair wrote.

The solicitation was written during the Trump administration, when EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics was not allowed to use contract resources for climate change work.

Instead, the requirements were written very broadly to cover all areas that EPA studies. But EPA officials felt that with the Biden administration’s focus on climate change, the contract would be used extensively for climate studies.

The technical evaluation committee chair said there wasn’t enough in the solicitation and the proposals to evaluate the bidders’ capabilities to conduct climate studies.

EPA canceled the contract in late February because it no longer met the needs of the agency.

Abt Associates filed a protest in March to argue the cancellation was a pretext to avoid awarding a contract to Abt.

The Government Accountability Office denied Abt’s protest, saying that EPA took reasonable action and documented its concern that the contract wouldn’t meet its current needs.

According to a redacted version of GAO's decision released Thursday, the record evaluation also doesn’t show that Abt would have won the competition.

The other unnamed bidder had higher scores for its technical approach, staffing approach and past performance. The value of the contract is not disclosed in the decision.

EPA also felt that a reworked solicitation with more climate change requirements would draw more bidders than the two who submitted proposals.

Both bidders mentioned climate change capabilities in their proposals, but EPA officials felt they couldn’t evaluate and assigned strengths or weaknesses to those parts of the proposal because climate change wasn’t called out in the performance work statement.

“This meant that the agency could not adequately evaluate vendors’ capabilities to conduct climate change analyses--a priority need going forward--because such analyses were not required by the PWS,” GAO wrote.

EPA was also concerned that if they evaluated climate change capabilities under the original solicitation, “it may have been evaluating vendors based on undisclosed evaluation criteria,” the watchdog agency said.

The agency argued that a new solicitation with more requirements for climate studies might attract more bidders and result in better competition.

Under the Biden administration, 50 percent or more of the requirements would involve climate analytical work. EPA said it would also need more need studies involving environmental justice analysis and other studies reflecting Biden administration priorities.

Is there a lesson here? Priorities change from one administration, to another but this one might be more of 180-degree turn versus most topics..

But a year from now, we’ll be in the midst of a presidential campaign. It could be wise to map campaign priorities to the contract requirements, just to be prepared.