The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) on Tuesday denied a bid protest over a five-year, $137 million contract issued to a Professional Project Services (Pro2Serve) affiliate to provide technical support to the U.S. Energy Department’s Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office (PPPO).
A rival bidder, Strategic Management Solutions Inc. (SMSI), filed its initial protest on Sept. 9, followed by a supplemental protest on Oct. 7. Both were denied this week, according to an entry on the GAO website.
No details are publicly available yet on the reasoning behind the congressional auditor’s decision. “This protest is covered by a protective order, which means that some information in the decision may require redaction before public release,” the GAO said in its posting. A final, redacted version of the document is typically made available publicly two to three weeks after the affected parties are informed of the outcome.
“We are disappointed, but not surprised in that the government has broad capabilities to either uphold or deny,” an SMSI official said by telephone Tuesday.
In August, DOE awarded the technical services contract for the second time in two years to Pro2Serve’s Oak Ridge, Tenn.-based Enterprise Technical Assistance Services (E-TAS). Company and DOE representatives could not immediately be reached for comment Wednesday.
The Pro2Serve unit initially was awarded the business in late June 2018. But the Energy Department withdrew the contract a couple months afterward when SMSI filed its first bid protest.
In January, the Energy Department issued a limited RFP with some of the original bidders. Updated proposals were filed in March, and the agency re-awarded the contract to the same vendor in August.
In its protest, SMSI argued that its offer provided the “best value” for the federal government, and also argued that the winner seemed to have a conflict of interest, a source said.
The Energy Department is electing to go with a single provider of information technology, technical engineering, and safeguards and security management across the PPPO complex, which covers the Portsmouth Site in Ohio, the Paducah Site in Kentucky, depleted uranium hexafluoride conversion (DUF6) facilities at the two former gaseous diffusion plants, and the Lexington, Ky., headquarters operation.
The business is now distributed among Pro2Serve at Paducah; RSI EnTech, of Oak Ridge, at Portsmouth; and Albuquerque, N.M.-based Strategic Management Solutions for the DUF6 operations. The firms all received their initial contracts in 2013 and are currently working under a series of incremental extensions that are due to expire at the end of the month.
