Such Information ‘Inside Baseball,’ DAS Surash Says
Mike Nartker
WC Monitor
3/6/2015
Acknowledging that there is no regulatory prohibition against the release of the information, the top acquisition official in the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management this week defended EM’s practice of blocking the public release of the identities of Source Selection Officials and members of Source Evaluation Boards for procurements. EM Deputy Assistant Secretary for Acquisition and Project Management Jack Surash said during a business forum at DOE headquarters that it is his “personal policy” to not release such information. “My policy is that we publicly reveal one member of the entire procurement—the contracting officer. And that is the public face of the procurement. The exact makeup, membership, voting members, who the source selection official is, is inside baseball. It’s not public information. That’s my personal policy,” Surash said.
DOE’s various program offices appear to take different approaches to making the identities of SSOs and SEB members public. The National Nuclear Security Administration has released such information publicly, such as during the procurement for the new contract to manage the Y-12 and Pantex sites. However, the NNSA has chosen to back away from releasing such information for the recently launched procurement for a new contract to manage the Kansas City National Security Campus. The Office of Science last year made public the name of the SSO used for the procurement for a new contract to manage the Brookhaven National Laboratory.
When asked if there would be transparency benefits for EM in making public the identities of SSOs and/or SEB members, Surash said, “I’m the head of contracting activity. This is the way I’m running the procurement shop here. The Senior Procurement Executive is fully aware and supports what I’m doing. It’s the typical practice in other agencies.” He went on to say, “At the end of the day, a decision is being made by the Department of Energy on a procurement. Yes, there is a Source Selection Official and he or she is the decision-maker. They are empowered and they are part of an intricate process that has checks and balances that attempt to ensure that everything was done fair [and] proper.”
‘We Pay Very Close Attention to Who Our SSOs Are’
The NNSA’s Y-12/Pantex procurement demonstrated that the identity of the SSO or Source Selection Authority (SSA) can have a significant impact on the award process. The NNSA changed SSAs for the procurement mid-stream but the SSA at award, Michael Lempke, directly used his personal experience overseeing Bechtel’s consolidation of the Bettis and Knolls laboratories as a discriminator to select Bechtel-led Consolidated Nuclear Security for the contract, according documents released by the Government Accountability Office in adjudicating protests of the award. GAO upheld the approach taken by Lempke.
Surash noted that EM does identify who the SSO at the end of a procurement, when bidders are informed as to who won the contract. “In EM, it’s the SSO that makes the one good call and the three not so good calls if we have four proposers. That’s the way I run things here,” he said. “We pay very close attentions to who our SSOs are and we want to ensure that they don’t have recusals or contracts or anything else that could potentially taint the good work we’re trying to do,” Surash said. “In my time here … I don’t remember situations where our SSOs had any kind of a cloud of a certain background or a certain whatever that influenced them.”
Past Performance to Continue as Top Evaluation Criteria for EM
Surash also said at this week’s business forum that EM will continue to make past performance its top evaluation criteria for procurements. Last month, NNSA acquisition chief Bob Raines indicated that while likely to still remain important, the NNSA would decide on a case-by-case basis where past performance ranks in evaluation criteria. “We are staying with past performance [as the top evaluation criteria],” Surash said. “We’ve been on this track for several years and this kind of emphasis is going to take some time to see how it works. I’m personally a big believer that past performance should matter a lot with respect to making a procurement decision.”
EM to Increase Focus on Socio-Economic Subcategories of Small Businesses
Going forward, EM plans to place an increased focus on making contracting opportunities available for the various socio-economic categories of small businesses, such as HUBZone, 8(a), woman-owned and service-disabled veteran-owned firms, Surash said. “In the past, we probably just stopped at, ‘Oh, we’re setting it aside for small business.’ And so what that means is it’s set aside for any and all small businesses. … We have not been meeting our service disabled-veteran [goals], our woman-owned [goals], our HUBZone [goals], maybe not even our 8(a) [goals].”
He added, “So as we do our acquisition planning, what we’re going to be doing is step one, do we have two or more interested small businesses for this upcoming deal? Step two, before we make the final decision, do we have two or more in one of the … socioeconomic categories—service-disabled veteran, woman-owned, 8(a), HUBZone? And if we do, we may restrict it to just those because that’s the one way I can really influence those goals. … Those are going to be harder because that’s not just going to small businesses; it’s going to a very thin sector in the small business community.”
