The Department of Energy will not bring on a new small-business contractor to run its National Training Center in New Mexico before early August, a recent procurement document shows.
On April 30, DOE extended through Aug. 5 the contract it awarded in 2018 to training center incumbent Kupono Government Services, meaning it will take almost four years and maybe longer for the agency to award the 10-year, $340-million deal that will replace the one Kupono holds now.
Lively competition for the work and two rounds of protests have contributed to the slow turn over at the training center. DOE has now held two competitions for the work and had not announced a winner as of this week and DOE.
In 2023, protests scuttled DOE’s December 2022 award to Eagle Harbor, an Alaska Native Corporation with offices in Manassas, Va., and Anchorage, Alaska, after the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in June of that year said DOE should redo the whole competition instead of making an award based on limited revisions to the original proposals. The competition Eagle Harbor won stemmed from a solicitation that hit the street in September 2020.
DOE’s National Training Center, on Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, N.M. near the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Sandia National Laboratories main campus, provides varieties of training for agency and contractor personnel, including in nuclear safety, government ethics and firearms use, according to the center’s website.
DOE declined to comment on whether they have made a selection for the contract takeover come August.
The three companies that protested the 2022 award of the National Training Center contract were incumbent Kupono, Chenega Reliable Services, an Alaskan small business government contractor in San Antonio, Texas, and Akima Systems Engineering, an Alaska Native defense contractor in Herndon, Va.
The companies’ initial protests were not made public, but according to GAO’s decision from 2023, the competitors complained of poor evaluation of proposal costs, misleading and unequal discussions with bidders and that DOE did not evaluate proposals the way it said it would in its solicitation.
GAO in February 2023 dismissed the protests of the award itself after DOE said it would take “corrective action” and make a new decision if bidders revised their cost proposals, according to the office’s June 2023 decision.
But in March 2023, the companies protested DOE’s corrective action, claiming that the agency was unfairly limiting the kinds of proposal revisions it would allow.
The protesters specifically called out DOE’s decision to allow revisions to cost proposals only. Kupono in particular requested that the agency also allow revisions to technical proposals, which the company said are intertwined with the cost proposals.
This time, GAO agreed and sustained the protest, setting off a series of sole-source extensions for Kupono at the training center, most recently until this summer’s final full month.
The four competitors did not reply to requests for comment on their potential bids for the second competition.
