TSA plans to beef up its IT help desk

The Department of Homeland Security is planning to bring on a contractor to support the Transportation Security Administration’s IT help desk, according to a post on the department’s contract opportunity forecast website. 

TSA intends to spend more than $100 million on the endeavor, which the agency expects to award in the third quarter of this fiscal year. The project will support TSA’s 85,000-member workforce across 500 locations and is estimated to run until 2031. 

“TSA requires an IT contractor who can locally support the users and IT equipment and provide a central help desk for rapid responses and trouble resolution,” per the forecast, which was published Thursday on APFS. 

DHS estimates a formal request for offers will go live next week. 

IT support services are a behind-the-scenes operation but are critical to the federal government’s success, especially as more programs and workflows rely on technology. For vendors, these types of contracts are typically competitive and feature significant investment. 

DHS received 30 bids for a five-year, $983 million contract to provide desktop support services to its Office of the Chief Information Officer. 

CACI was announced as the frontrunner in September, becoming responsible for the 18,000 user accounts, more than 11,000 end-user workstations and 2,000-plus network devices. The Virginia-based national security company was also awarded a five-year, $416 million contract in January to support and modernize the Navy’s IT systems. 

With the shift to centralize government procurement under the General Services Administration last year, solicitations and awards have taken a different tack. In-progress projects have been cancelled, and GSA is in charge of negotiating deals with vendors, rather than agencies having the authority to do so. DHS, for example, scrapped a $10 billion IT and software contract in June as a means to comply with executive orders and avoid redundancies.