Under the end state contracting approach, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management has embraced indefinite duration, indefinite quantity agreements to a greater extent, the acting head of contracting, Angela Watmore, told an industry gathering in Eastern Tennessee Wednesday.
“We took a hard look at where we were in the cleanup portfolio” for the 16 Cold War and Manhattan Project sites overseen by the Office of Environmental Management, Watmore told a conference sponsored by the Energy Technology and Environmental Business Association (ETEBA).
Under what it calls the end state approach, Environmental Management is reducing its reliance on traditional “cost-plus” contracts for environmental cleanup and embraced indefinite duration, indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contracts to a greater degree than before, Watmore said.
“We basically pulled the IDIQ approach off the shelf,” Watmore said. While Environmental Management has used it previously, “the newness is using it for facility operations” for environmental work, she added.
Environmental Management sought to see “how we could do a better job of getting to completion,” and the IDIQ and its reliance on task orders, should help accomplish that, Watmore said.
ETEBA, a trade association representing companies doing business with the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons complex. ETEBA kicked off its annual business opportunities conference in Knoxville, Tenn., with a panel presentation on contracting, which included Watmore and field office managers from across the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, and the Portsmouth-Paducah Project Office.
Presentations were also scheduled by Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.) and various federal cleanup officials.
After being a virtual event last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s conference is a hybrid one with both people attending in person and others watching the speakers online. Watmore and most DOE speakers are appearing virtually.
