The 10-day clock is ticking to protest the National Nuclear Security Administration’s award of a potentially decade-long management contract for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, now that the agency has debriefed the companies behind three failed bids to run the storied New Mexico weapons lab.
Debriefs of losing bidders wrapped up this Friday, June 22, a spokesperson for National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) confirmed. The agency awarded a Los Alamos management contract June 8 to Triad National Security. The pact is valued at more than $20 billion over 10 years, including options. Annual lab-management fees were capped at $50 million, according to the NNSA’s solicitation.
Triad is led by Battelle Memorial Institute, with senior partners the University of California — which has managed Los Alamos in one form or another since the lab’s founding during World War II — and Texas A&M University.
The NNSA said it received four responsive bids, including Triad’s. Other companies and institutions known to have bid are:
- Bechtel National and Purdue University. Bechtel is one of two senior partners on the outgoing Los Alamos prime, Los Alamos National Security.
- The University of Texas and an unidentified industry partner or partners.
- Jacobs Engineering and BWX Technologies. BWX Technologies is a junior partner on the incumbent contractor.
None of these companies and institutions replied to requests for comment this week. Debriefs are an agency’s way of explaining why it did not select a contract proposal.
If the award sticks, Triad will be responsible for manufacturing fissile weapons cores called plutonium pits, and overseeing Los Alamos’ portfolio of high-energy physics programs that are designed to appraise the potency of existing nuclear weapons without resorting to nuclear explosive tests. The contract also includes some $2 billion worth of work funded by agencies other than NNSA over the life of the deal. Los Alamos employs roughly 11,200 personnel, more than 7,000 of whom work for the site prime contractor.
With the debriefs done, each losing bidder now can huddle internally and decide if there are grounds to protest the NNSA’s award to the Government Accountability Office in an attempt to force a do-over on the competition. To successfully contest the award, bidders would have to prove the NNSA’s source selection official did not follow the agency’s rules for selecting a winner.
In evaluating bids for the next Los Alamos manager, the semiautonomous Energy Department agency considered two factors: technical and management capabilities, and cost. Technical and management capabilities were “significantly more important” than cost, the NNSA said in the October solicitation, but cost could be used as a tie-breaker between two bids the agency judged to be roughly equal on the other merits.
Within the all-important technical and management category, the NNSA evaluated three criteria: past performance, including previous work on NNSA sites; key personnel, or the bidder’s proposed leadership team; and the extent to which small businesses were included in the bid.
The solicitation also required that the winning bidder deliver “organizational culture change.”
“The contractor shall improve the organizational culture by proactively balancing the conduct of operations in every aspect of executing the statement of work,” the NNSA wrote in the solicitation.
The tenure of incumbent Los Alamos National Security — the team comprising the University of California and Bechtel, with BWXT Technologies and AECOM — was marred by safety slipups and management gaffes that eventually led the NNSA to boot the team out of the lab and put the management contract up for grabs. The incumbent came on the job in 2006 and had options in its contract that could have kept it in place until 2026.
A protest would not necessarily disrupt the NNSA’s plan to start transferring Los Alamos management responsibilities over to Triad as part of a planned four-month contract transition period. The agency is allowed to proceed with a transition, even in the midst of a protest, if there is a national security imperative to do so.
If a protester succeeds in overturning the Triad award, however, the NNSA could be forced to extend Los Alamos National Security’s contract past its Sept. 30 expiration date while it conducts a second competition.
