The Energy Department Office of Environmental Management plans to beef up its procurement staff to evaluate contract proposals.
The nuclear cleanup office said in a July 16 press release it is launching an “acquisition corps” to increase its talent pool of procurement specialists at field sites and the Cincinnati-based Environmental Management Consolidated Business Center (EMCBC).
Environmental Management did not indicate how many new hires are expected, but said they would serve on acquisition integrated project teams and source evaluation boards (SEBs), which vet contract proposals submitted for work at the 16 Cold War and Manhattan Project sites. A DOE spokesperson declined Thursday to comment beyond what’s in the press release and federal hiring notice.
“Given how integral acquisition and contracting is to how we conduct our work, successful execution of major procurements is essential to the EM mission,” Senior Adviser for Environmental Management William (Ike) White said in the release.
In the past year, the Environmental Management office has issued four major contracts — two for support services and Central Plateau remediation at the Hanford Site in Washington state; keeping Navarro Research and Engineering as the cleanup provider for the Nevada National Security Site; and picking a number of companies for a nationwide deactivation, decommissioning, and removal (DD&R) contract providing for services throughout the weapons complex.
There are also multiple solicitations in the pipeline, such as the follow-on Idaho Cleanup Project contact and management of the Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina.
Two of the three industry sources who spoke with Weapons Complex Monitor agreed the Office of Environmental Management needs to strengthen its procurement bench.
“They don’t have enough of them, I tell you that much,” an industry source said Tuesday by telephone of the office’s plan to hire more procurement experts.
More expertise is needed to offset brain drain, stemming from retirements and departures, along with managing EM’s shift toward the so-called “end state” contracting, the source said.
The end-state model’s relies on indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) deals, where the value is calculated by task, the source said. The traditional DOE approach involved drafting long-term work plans far in advance of the contract award. The new approach, while offering more flexibility in planning work is also more “piecemeal,” with contracts awarded based on a limited set of tasks and more tasks negotiated as the contract continues.
Environmental contracts at Hanford Central Plateau and the Nevada National Security Site are among the first round of contracts employing the end-state approach. It is a structural change for vendors and can be labor-intensive for the procurement staff at DOE, the industry source said, because new task specifics are deliberated throughout the life of the contract.
A second source agreed Thursday the nuclear cleanup office needs bolstering on the solicitation process. Procurement officials at Environmental Management often fail to meet their own internal deadlines for issuing requests for proposals and “virtually everything they do is protested.” The source was referencing contract challenges filed with the Governmental Accountability Office.
The second source, however, disagreed that end-state contracts makes work difficult for the staff. A good procurement team should be able to handle both traditional long-term prime contracts and the end-state IDIQ task order awards, he said.
A third source disputed that beefing up the procurement staff should be a priority for DOE nuclear cleanup. The office’s contract evaluations these days seem limited to only a couple items — past performance and key personnel. As a result, it is not clear there is a significant need for new procurement expertise, he said.
The application deadline ended Wednesday for GS-14 program managers, which make between $112,000 and $145,000 annually, as well as program manager positions that pay between $131,000 and $170,000 annually.
There are limited number of people in these sorts of procurement specialist jobs at EM, “no more than a dozen,” the second source said. Typically, many of them are lawyers, although that is not a requirement, he added.
