The Energy Communities Alliance and local groups around the Hanford Site in Washington state claim a change in contracting policy by the Department of Energy could cripple some local subcontractors.
In essence, the critics say DOE is ending many existing professional and support subcontracts at Hanford and encouraging the site’s new support services and central plateau cleanup contractors, which came onboard in January, to hire workers away from the subcontractors.
This might be a reaction to a DOE Inspector General report on contractor staffing issues, the Energy Communities Alliance (ECA) said this week, with the DOE Office of Environmental Management (EM) ditching staff augmentation subcontracts in favor of managed tasks or fixed price contracts.
During January’s transition to the Leidos-led Hanford Mission Integration Solutions and the Amentum-led Central Plateau Cleanup Co. — respectively, the new support services and solid-waste cleanup contractors — “nearly all” the existing professional and support services subcontracts were eliminated and “the subcontractor’s employees have been hired (some say ‘taken’) at the direction of DOE by the prime contractors,” ECA chairman Ron Woody wrote in a Thursday letter to William (Ike) White, the acting EM chief.
The Hanford Communities organization and the Tri-City Development Council said the transitions “put a substantial number of local companies at risk of going out of business,” according to a Wednesday letter they wrote to Acting Secretary of Energy David Huizenga.
Part of the problem, as ECA sees it, is that some subcontractors are not deemed critical by DOE even though they were part of winning bids from the new primes.
The attitude seems to be “Yeah, you were part of the team, but sorry you are going to have to bid on that work’” ECA’s executive director Seth Kirshenberg, said by phone Thursday.
Reached by email on Friday, a spokesperson for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management said the agency was reviewing the effects of subcontracting changes at Henford to “ensure that EM continues to serve as a strong steward of taxpayer resources while seeking to mitigate potential unanticipated impacts.”
The EM review should take several weeks, the spokesperson said. The spokesperson also burnished EM’s record for including small businesses in its $7-billion-a-year nuclear cleanup mission, calling the office “a strong champion of small businesses, having received a top grade from the Small Business Administration for its efforts in recent years.”
Although DOE and the new primes plan to issue new subcontracting opportunities within nine months, many small businesses may not survive that long without an opportunity to compete for work, ECA wrote in its letter to White.
At least one subcontractor has already taken its grievances to court.
In January, a federal judge in Virginia refused to throw out a suit brought by Professional Project Services or Pro2Serve, claiming Leidos wrongly excluded it from the Hanford Mission Integration Solutions. The Leidos-led team, like Central Plateau Cleanup, took over on Jan. 25. As part of its defense, Leidos argues that it was DOE’s decision not to issue it a sole-source subcontract for the work Pro2Serve sought.
The ECA and the Hanford area groups have asked DOE agency to reconsider the change it made at Hanford, before they become the norm across the weapons complex.
