GSA Reassesses $15B Alliant Small-Business Awards: What’s Ahead

By Laura Criste and Daniel Snyder

The General Services Administration must reconsider bids submitted for a 10-year, $15 billion contract known as Alliant 2 Small Business (A2SB) following a decision by the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. Alliant 2 SB delivers information technology services.

Click here for details of the decision, which enjoins GSA from proceeding with its current awardee list. The agency improperly credited bids for having acceptable cost accounting systems and failed to evaluate bid prices in a consistent manner, the court said.

Five contractors had previously been unsuccessful in their attempts to protest Alliant 2 Small Business.

GSA issued 81 awards in February 2018. The evaluation process had companies self-score; awards were planned to go to the 80 highest technically rated offers with fair and reasonable prices. A tie at the 80th rank forced GSA to make 81 awards.

Only seven of 68 Alliant SB incumbents received awards on A2SB.

What’s Ahead

The predecessor to A2SB, Alliant Small Business (ASB), has generated nearly $8 billion for about 70 companies since fiscal 2009.

ASB is set to expire on April 30, 2019, which will force the agency to rush any corrective action while also accommodating follow-on orders.

Recompete work that should have been eligible for competition through A2SB at this stage will now have to be competed on other vehicles. The GSA has two options:

  • The most likely option is that GSA extends the ASB ordering period beyond April 2019 and allows ASB recompete orders to continue being fulfiilled through ASB until A2SB is ready.
  • Funding agencies could choose to compete existing ASB orders on other IT vehicles. If that happens, the vehicles most likely to receive orders could be contracts such as GSA’s IT-70, NASA’s SEWP V, GSA’s 8(a) STARS, or HHS’s CIO-SP3.

It’s unclear how much time GSA may need to reevaluate bids. Given that bids were submitted in October 2016, it’s possible companies may have a chance to recertify that information remains accurate before GSA reshuffles awards for a new list of recipients.

Another option for corrective action: GSA could revise the minimum threshold for self-scoring evaluation, which could produce more than 80 A2SB contract holders. The minimum winning score, out of 59,200 possible points, wasn’t published by the agency. GSA received 493 proposals, according to a February 2018 agency announcement.

Using BGOV

Clients can use Bloomberg Government tools and resources to capture work that has been purchased through ASB.

  • Click here to access 124 Alliant Small Business statements of work that Bloomberg Government obtained through FOIA requests.

Clients competing for the follow-on task order work, either through an ASB extension or other contract vehicles, can use these SOWs to help prepare their proposals after the current contract ordering period ends on April 30. Clients that eventually win A2SB awards can also use the SOWs to prepare for follow-on work that moves onto the new contract.

BGOV has received the ASB SOWs as part of a larger initative to request SOWs through the Freedom of Information Act for more than a dozen contract vehicles. Clients can read more about the initiative and vehicles included here. A listing of all task orders with SOWs received as part of this initiative can be found here.

  • Click here for the 246 Alliant SB task orders that expire starting on May 1, the day after the contract ends. The task orders’ transactions have a total value of $3.3 billion since fiscal 2010. Of those 246 expiring orders, BGOV has received SOWs through the FOIA initiative for 99 of the task orders. Those 99 task orders have a total transaction value of $2.1 billion, which accounts for about 64 percent of value of the expiring work.
  • Click here to access an Alliant 2 and A2SB Multiple-award Contract (MAC) analysis published in April 2018 that explores vehicles dynamics such as top funding agencies, companies, and expiring orders by quarter, and other important contract characteristics.

To contact the analysts: Laura Criste in Washington, D.C. at lcriste@bgov.com; Daniel Snyder at dsnyder@bgov.com

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jodie Morris at jmorris@bgov.com

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