CIO-SP3 now stretches into 2025 amid recompete's holding pattern
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By
Ross Wilkers
Technical issues related to the large volume of records surrounding the CIO-SP4 contract are getting in the way of the court case moving ahead.
With no clear end in sight on the CIO-SP4 protest situation, the National Institutes of Health's IT acquisition arm has given itself more runway on the current iteration of that contract.
NIH's IT Acquisition and Assessment Center previously extended the CIO-SP3 vehicle in April by another six months to Oct. 29, 2024. Three months on from that move, NITAAC has added six more months to make April 29, 2025 the new expiration date.
A total of 17 companies have filed protests at the U.S. Court of Federal Claims regarding the CIO-SP4 contract, mainly centering around NITAAC's self-scoring methodology to evaluate bids. Futron filed its complaint to the court in February and is the case under which the other 16 protests are consolidated.
At this juncture, NITAAC is working to submit its administrative record for the $50 billion CIO-SP4 vehicle after collecting the large volume of information surrounding this procurement. Friday was the deadline for NITAAC to turn that into the court.
But in a filing that same day, government attorneys representing NITAAC reported that Justice Department staff encountered a series of technical issues in transferring the 92.6-gigabyte sized administrative record from a local drive to a drive for production.
Justice staff have also encountered problems in obtaining the error log, which would help resolve those technical issues. They may have to reprocess portions of, or the entire, record to resolve the problem unless a more expedient solution can be devised.
NITAAC's staff is also behind on production of other administrative records that include information for procurements with a short turnaround time to award, according to their newest filing.
Attorneys representing NITAAC and counsel for the protesters are scheduled to discuss next steps on Friday. They have also agreed to defer the filing of any joint status report to the court until 10 days after the administrative record is submitted.