Department of Energy contractor officers should by Friday, and unilaterally, if necessary, modify the agency’s existing major site contracts to include a COVID-19 mandate, according to long-awaited guidance published Wednesday by DOE.
The directive applies to “Management and Operating (M&O) contracts, major site/facility contracts and onsite support service contracts,” the agency wrote in the guidance.
Officially, that’s an encouragement by DOE, not a requirement. However, “DOE is working with its contractors to expeditiously incorporate the clause into existing contracts,” an agency spokesperson told Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor on Friday.
President Joe Biden’s executive order calling for vaccine clauses in federal contract is, by and large, mandatory only for contracts solicited after Oct. 15 and awarded on or after Nov. 15. However, the mandate also will kick in whenever a federal agency picks up an option on an existing contract, so all major DOE site management contractors with options remaining will, in a best-case business scenario, get a mandate eventually.
But DOE, and its semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which have more than 20 big site contracts between them that account for more contract spending than just about any agency outside of the Pentagon, don’t want to wait that long.
“[T]he Department strongly endorses the widest possible implementation of Executive Order 14042 and expects its Contracting Officers to apply all guidance as liberally, resourcefully, and quickly as possible to existing contracts, consistent with all applicable laws and regulations,” reads the agency’s guidance for implementing Biden’s executive order.
As for contracts put out for bid before Oct. 15, and for which DOE has not received proposals, they should be modified to include the COVID-mandate clause “if it is possible,” DOE wrote in the guidance issued Wednesday. Contracts put out for bid after Oct. 15 will automatically have to include the clause.
The NNSA had seven active management and operations contracts covering the eight major active civilian nuclear weapon sites in the DOE enterprise, plus one active request for proposals: the next management and operations contract for the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas and the Y-12 National Security Site for Oak Ridge, Tenn. However, the three hopeful bidders have already turned in their final proposals for that potentially 10-year megadeal, and an award was expected this month, sources have told Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
Meanwhile, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM), which is cleaning up shuttered nuclear-weapon production sites that produced plutonium and enriched uranium during the Manhattan Project and the Cold War, had 15 site facility management contracts across the weapons complex that are either active or in transition. Some are for site cleanup or demolition, others for landlord-type services.
EM also had final requests for proposals out for the next major weapons-cleanup contracts at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The office also tentatively planned to drop final solicitations for four major cleanup contracts between October and January.
The two EM solicitations forecast for no earlier than October, for liquid waste cleanup at the Hanford Site in Washington state and and for management of the Savannah River Site, won’t have to include the vaccine clause if they hit the street before the end of next week. The EM competitions scheduled to start no earlier than January — for depleted uranium hexafluoride and site mission support at the Portsmouth and Paducah sites in Ohio and Kentucky and decontamination and decommissioning at Portsmouth — will be a lock to get a vaccine modification.
