Officials ‘confident’ CIO-SP4 will be awarded before end of predecessor’s extension

Leaders of the National Institutes of Health agency responsible for a $50 billion governmentwide IT services acquisition vehicle are “confident” that the contract will be awarded before the new expiration date for its predecessor next spring.

The two top officials for the NIH Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center told FedScoop in an interview that the agency and the Department of Justice are currently working through challenges to the contract, CIO-SP4, in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, and expect to have a decision from the court in the next few months.

Ricky Clark, deputy director of NITAAC, said the agency is “very confident” that the new contract will be awarded before the end of CIO-SP3’s six-month extension to April 2025 that was announced last month.

“We’re looking now, based on what we’ve been told by the DOJ team, that we should have a decision somewhere in the November, December timeframe,” Clark said.

After that, the agency expects to run CIO-SP4 and CIO-SP3 alongside each other for a period of one to two months to account for any issues moving over to a new vehicle, NITAAC Director Brian Goodger said.

“There’s going to be a couple hiccups in the beginning. There’s going to be some lessons learned. There’s going to be some system errors,” Goodger said, adding that the agency wants “to have both vehicles up at the same time, so that if something were to go awry with one of the vehicles there would be the other one for customers to use.”

The award process for CIO-SP4 is currently in phase one. Once the litigation is resolved and the remaining two phases can move forward, Clark said he expects things to move fairly quickly, estimating that once that process is done, the agency should have the contract ready within “four to six weeks.”

“A lot of this is dependent upon the decision that the court makes, so whatever decision that is, we have to pivot and move in that direction,” Clark said. “But from my standpoint, we’re very confident that we’ll be moving forward.”

Extension timing

CIO-SP4, which stands for Chief Information Officer-Solutions and Partners 4, is the fourth iteration of the governmentwide acquisition contract for IT services. The 10-year contract first began soliciting proposals in May 2021 and has continued to face challenges from companies competing for inclusion ever since.

Last summer, for example, the Government Accountability Office sustained dozens of complaints, or bid protests, and the agency again committed to corrective action. Almost immediately after NITAAC started sending new notices to successful and unsuccessful offerors, bid protests at GAO and the Court of Federal Claims reemerged, and in February, NITAAC announced it was requesting to extend the contract through October. 

At the same time that it requested that extension, Goodger said the agency also requested the extension it announced last month “just in case.” Those requests need to be granted by a cabinet-level agency secretary and the process can take time.

The reason it was announced last month, Goodger said, was to both “calm any fears or questions from the customer base” and give the agency time to run the two contracts concurrently for a period.

“We don’t actually need the full six months,” Goodger said, adding “we might start CIO-SP4 in March or April.”

In the meantime, NITAAC has emphasized that its doors are still open to handle IT contracting needs. In its July extension announcement for CIO-SP3 and its small business counterpart, NITAAC said that the contracts “are available for use during the busy end of year buying season.”

What’s left

Before CIO-SP4 can be awarded, the remaining bid protests must be resolved. The only remaining complaints for the CIO-SP4 are currently in the Court of Federal Claims. 

Unlike challenges before the GAO, however, which have a 100-day time limit on a decision, the Court of Federal Claims doesn’t have similar time constraints, which makes timing guesswork.

“For us, the extension was required in order for us to work through this process because of the amount of unknowns,” Clark said.

While much of that docket isn’t public while the litigation moves forward, Clark said: “Thus far, all the allegations are exactly the same as what we’ve seen at GAO, so we’re fairly confident that we’ve done what we need to do to be able to address those concerns — or the protests.”

The agency has also recently made progress reimbursing companies that had their complaints sustained by GAO after those payments were delayed. Clark said the agency started paying those off in July.

As reported by NextGov in June, some companies that had successful challenges last summer were still waiting on reimbursements.

Goodger told FedScoop the reason for that delay was that the agency “simply didn’t have any excess revenue to pay out.” As a 100% fee-for-service organization, NITAAC isn’t appropriated by Congress, and as a result of the prolonged bid protest process, the agency has retained additional contractor support for longer than it expected. 

Those contractors “are really good workers, but expensive, and as a result, our financial position has gone negative, at least for points of time in this past fiscal year,” Goodger said.

Protest process

Bid protests are an issue that impact agencies outside NIH, but the protests to CIO-SP4 have been uniquely plentiful. 

Last year, CIO-SP4 drove a 22% spike in bid protests handled by GAO, for example. But Clark said the issue isn’t CIO-SP4 specifically; it’s governmentwide acquisition contracts, or GWACs, generally.

Clark said it’s “because of the ceiling — the anticipated dollar amounts.” Small businesses might be thinking a contract is the “only show in town” and if they’re not above the cutline — or cut off for proposals to move on to the next phase of the process — they don’t have many options. Clark said somewhere between 90% to 95% of the protests are from small businesses.

Each time NITAAC has committed to corrective action following bid protests, it’s had to essentially retrace its steps. 

When asked what that process is like for the agency, Clark said it’s not necessarily easy but the agency has been “pretty fortunate” because the aspects they’ve had to redo are just one step, such as taking a look at companies’ self-evaluations again.

But corrective action does take time.

“This point, we’ve probably done it three times, so that is a lot of reviewing,” Clark said. “But each time we do it, we wipe the slate clean. Any guidance we’ve been provided by GAO, we follow that guidance, and we — I like to say we don’t take it personal.”