The Court of Federal Claims should let the Department of Energy sunset Swift & Staley’s existing contract for landlord services at the Paducah Site in Kentucky by May 31, 2023, the federal government repeated this week.
Swift & Staley is the incumbent on the contract and had won a follow-on award to continue providing these services at Paducah, but the claims court this year finally ruled that Swift & Staley was too big to have competed for the follow-on, small-business set-aside award in the first place. That is precisely the argument rival bidder Akima Intra-Data has made since late 2020, first before the Small Business Administration and, later, in the Court of Federal Claims.
But last week, the claims court stayed its own order so that Swift & Staley could keep the case alive in the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The trial court judge has said the incumbent is unlikely to win its appeal and retain its award of the follow-on landlord contract, but that it should not be booted off its current contract by May 31, 2023 or forbidden from competing for any new award the government contemplates. Appeals courts are not always quick to act.
But the federal government would not accept that argument and wrote in a recent filing that setting a hard date for the end of the current landlord services contract would “allow all parties to plan appropriately” for the eventual award of a new contract to replace the one Swift & Staley has held since 2015.
