Bid protests of large federal contracts are a fact of life, a top acquisition manager at the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management said during an online forum Thursday.
This is evidenced by the fact that two contract awards have been challenged in a little more than a week with the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Norbert Doyle, Environmental Management’s deputy assistant secretary for acquisition and project management said during the online session on agency procurement.
The acquisition wing of the DOE nuclear cleanup office holds several such updates on its procurements each year. Since the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in early 2020, the sessions have been conducted online.
“We now anticipate, based on the number of protests that we get, virtually every one of our acquisitions will be protested,” Doyle said, adding it creates much work for DOE’s legal staff. He said DOE has a good record in prevailing on most GAO protests.
“We actually have a pretty good track record of winning GAO protests, but it takes time,” Doyle said. GAO must rule on protests within 100 days and issues most of its decisions within 90 days of the filing, he added.
Only this week, Doyle said during a rundown of recent and pending procurements, Centerra filed a bid protest with GAO challenging DOE’s June 11 decision to reaffirm a February award that sent a $1-billion Security Services contract at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina to a team led by Securitas CIS.
Centerra — the incumbent security contractor at the DOE site near the Georgia state line under a $1-billion agreement that started in fall 2009 and is set to expire Oct. 7 — filed its bid protest Monday. Centerra filed a separate bid protest with GAO in May 2020 before the contract award was ever issued and withdrew it a month later.
Centerra’s protest this week arrived days after a Bechtel-led group, Idaho Remediation LLC, challenged DOE’s decision in late May to award a $6.4-billion Idaho National Laboratory cleanup contract to a Jacobs-led team.
“We are providing information to GAO on those two protests right now,” Doyle said.
While not a GAO protest, the Office of Environmental Management is also waiting for a federal court to rule on Swift & Staley’s $160-million infrastructure support services at the Paducah Site in Kentucky. The Small Business Administration rule that Swift & Staley did not meet the revenue restrictions for this particular set-aside contract. The DOE hopes a decision on the Paducah case might be issued in August, Doyle said.
EM Targets Fall Release of Final RFPs for 2 Megabuck Contracts
Final solicitations are coming this autumn for multibillion-dollar liquid waste cleanup contracts at Savannah River and the Hanford Site in Washington, DOE said this week.
The agency initially said this week those requests for proposals would arrive in September and October, respectively, but Doyle said the final solicitations might be spread more than a month apart in order to reduce the time that two such large offerings are on the street at the same time.
“We know it would be hard for industry to handle” such large procurements at the same time, Doyle said.
The final solicitations for the potential $21.5-billion Savannah River Site Management and Operating Contract should hit the street in September while the potential $26.5-billion Hanford Integrated Tank Disposition Contract could be out in October, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management said in a procurement update notice posted online.
Both potential 10-year contracts are, because of the expected payoff, attracting interest from the biggest names in the DOE weapons complex, sources said.
The DOE issued the draft RFP for the Savannah River operations contract, business now held by Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, in April. On the job since August 2008 under a contract currently valued at $15.8 billion, the incumbent will stay on the job at least through September, though DOE could exercise an option to keep it around through September 2022.
In March the agency dropped its draft RFP for the Hanford Site contract that would combine management and closure of Hanford’s 177 underground tanks with planned operation of the long-awaited Waste Treatment Plant being built by Bechtel. Responsibility for the tanks now rests with Amentum-led Washington River Protection Solutions.
Washington River Protection Solutions has been on the job since October 2008 with a contract currently valued at about $7.8-billion which is now scheduled to sunset in September, although DOE has options to keep it on through September 2023.
Due to the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Office of Environmental Management “generally expects to proceed with procurement functions that require limited or no face-to-face interactions or travel,” according to the notice. The notice goes on to add that timelines are subject to change given the impact of COVID-19.
Questions or feedback can be emailed to Aaron Deckard, the acquisition integration lead at the Cincinnati-based Environmental Management Consolidated Business Center at [email protected].
