SAIC loses final shot at $1.3B NASA IT competition
Gettyimages.com/ John M. Chase
By
Nick Wakeman
The space agency gets a favorable ruling in how it has managed the NASA Consolidated Applications and Platform Service contract, also called NCAPS.
The Government Accountability Office has denied Science Applications International Corp.’s bid to get back into the competition for a $1.3 billion NASA IT contract.
SAIC filed a protest after its elimination from the competition for what is known as the NASA Consolidated Applications and Platform Service contract, or NCAPS.
As the name implies, NCAPS is a consolidation of about 10 existing contracts into one single-award task order that will go through the Alliant 2 vehicle. SAIC is the incumbent on several of the existing contracts.
The company argued that its proposal wasn’t properly evaluated.
GAO’s May 10 decision isn’t public yet, but apparently GAO has decided that NASA's evaluation of the SAIC bid and decision were reasonable actions.
GAO has sole jurisdiction over task order protests, which means that SAIC cannot take its protest to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.
“We are disappointed in GAO’s decision,” an SAIC spokesperson told WT in a statement. “NASA continues to be one of our critical customers and we are fully invested in their mission and success.”
With the GAO decision, NASA can now move ahead on awarding the task order.
NASA is using NCAPS to bundle requirements and standardize how the agency manages IT systems and applications. The new order will have a nine-month base period followed by seven individual option years.
The winning prime contractor will be responsible for general IT, customer support, information management, mission support systems, and the integration of currently decentralized services contracts.