Honeywell’s wholly owned subsidiary National Engineering and Technology Solutions of Sandia will be the prime contractor for the Sandia National Laboratories for another five years, the National Nuclear Security Administration announced this week.
The semi-autonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency said in a press release that it exercised five options on National Engineering and Technology Solutions of Sandia’s (NTESS) contract to keep the company on site in Albuquerque, California and a multitude of smaller satellite sites through April 30, 2027. Awarded in 2016, the contract’s five-year base, which followed a four-month transition period, was set to expire at the end of the month.
The Honeywell subsidiary now is guaranteed to remain as the prime contractor at Sandia for as long as it possibly could have. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) held five one-year options on the contract and picked them all up at once.
In its press release, the NNSA said the most important factor motivating the agency to pick up all five options at once was “the immediate need for continuity of performance during Fiscal Years 2022 through 2027.”
An NNSA spokesperson declined to elaborate on the agency’s logic or address why picking up the options a year at a time would disrupt the continuity of operations at the weapons-engineering lab.
“NNSA looked at the totality of the circumstances – including NTESS’ past performance and the significant workload of its mission deliverables for NNSA in coming years – and concluded that exercising the five options concurrently now was the best way to meet those mission deliverables and the best value for the American taxpayer,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “NNSA has the authority, both contractually and legally, to exercise any combination of option terms outlined in the NTESS contract, taking into consideration value, past performance, and mission need.”
According to the regulations governing DOE management and operations contracts, the agency can consider “the impact of a change in a contractor on the Department’s discharge of its programs” when deciding if “the exercise of the option is in the Government’s best interest.”
According to a copy of the company’s contract posted online by the NNSA, annual fees on the deal run from about $20 million to almost $25 million over the life of the deal — 10 years, including the options just exercised.
