More companies join CIO-SP4 protests

The number of companies protesting how the National Institutes of Health is managing the $50 billion CIO-SP4 contract continues to grow.

Three more bidders have joined the lawsuit first filed in February at the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, bringing the total number of complainants to 15. Filings indicate that more might be on the way as well.

The companies are challenging the NIH IT Acquisition and Assessment Center CIO-SP4 contract, a government-wide acquisition vehicle for IT solutions and services.

Most of the filings at the court are still sealed including the original complaint, though the docket shows there is a proposed redacted version under review.

In April, NITAAC and its attorneys from the Justice Department asked for more time to file a status report and the administrative record of the procurement.

The status report is now due Friday and the administrative record is due May 31.

CIO-SP4 has a long history of protest troubles, with hundreds of protests filed at the Government Accountability Office in 2022 and 2023.

Many of those protests involved how NITAAC used a self-scoring mechanism for bidders to document their past performance and experience. Many companies argued that the threshold they had to clear to move on in the competition was arbitrarily set.

NITAAC took several corrective actions in response to the protest. GAO also ruled against NITAAC in June 2023 and recommended that it validate all the scores.

After NITAAC did this, it began the work to finalize awards in January. But that kicked off more protests and led to the current filings we see at the court.

As of this story's publication, the 15 protesters are:

• Analytica
• A Square Group
• Astor & Sanders
• Audacious Inquiry
• DevTech Systems
• Futron
• HagerV3
• Inalab Consulting
• Mission 1st Group
• Objective Function Systems
• Optimal Solutions
• RCHP
• Systems Plus
• Trigent Solutions
• VetsConnect