A federal judge in eastern Washington has scheduled a September 2025 jury trial in the Department of Justice’s case accusing a Leidos-led joint venture of false billing for fire prevention work at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site.
Barring settlement or good cause for delay, U.S. District Judge Stanley Bastian plans to commence the trial Sept. 22, 2025, in a federal courtroom in Richland, Wash., according to an order issued May 15.
The Justice Department’s False Claims Act lawsuit against Hanford Mission Integration Services, made up of Leidos, Centerra and Parsons, grew out of a whistleblower complaint, unsealed in January. The suit says the contractor overcharged DOE for millions of dollars’ worth of fire safety work.
The suit also alleges the contractor, which acts as something akin to a landlord or city manager at the shuttered nuclear weapons complex, failed to keep up to date on its inspection of fire suppression systems.
The contractor has asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing among other things that the case is without merit and DOE had access to all relevant performance data but continued to pay the work fees.
DOE only awarded Hanford Mission a little over a third of its subjective fee in fiscal 2023, due to weak performance on fire suppression system monitoring and upkeep. During fiscal 2023, “DOE was provided with evidence of numerous occasions when crews assigned to perform fire system maintenance were excessively idle,” the agency said in a January press release[WB1] , only days before Justice announced its case against Hanford Mission.
Hanford Mission has held the roughly $4 billion Infrastructure and Site Services contract since August 2020. It took over from another Leidos-led contractor. The five-year base period is scheduled to end Aug. 16, 2025.
