Contracts/Awards

GSA’s OASIS+ sucked into the protest void

Vendors still have a Sept. 22 deadline to submit bids for the General Services Administration’s OASIS+ governmentwide professional services vehicle despite a...

Jason Miller@jmillerWFED

September 12, 2023 1:35 pm

3 min read

The OASIS+ professional services governmentwide contract couldn’t avoid the protest bug after all.

Boston Consulting Group Federal filed a complaint with the Government Accountability Office on Aug. 28 over the terms of the solicitation. BCG Federal says the General Services Administration’s requirements are not consistent with the Federal Acquisition Regulations Part 15 and the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act, and unduly restricts competition. Specifically, BCG Federal says GSA shouldn’t be asking vendors to provide a cost breakdown of their fixed prices, such as direct labor rates, overhead rates, fringe benefits and profit.

GAO has until Dec. 6 to decide the case.

A GSA spokesperson says the protest will not delay the due date for proposals of Sept. 22.

GSA had hoped the way it was creating the OASIS+ procurement would avoid any lengthy protest delays that commonly impact large governmentwide contracts — see CIO-SP4, Alliant small business, Commerce’s CATTS and many others.

GSA released two draft requests for proposals and received a lot of feedback from industry driving changes from the first draft to the second draft to the final solicitation. GSA received more than 2,200 questions after the first draft. It also released a survey asking for industry input around specific elements of the acquisition strategy. The survey garnered 680 responses.

It’s still unclear how big of an impact BCG Federal’s protest will have on OASIS+, but any time a vendor brings concerns to GAO the likelihood of delays are real.

Since GSA released the six solicitations for OASIS+ on June 15, it has been holding industry days, training and answering questions from vendors over the last two-plus months.

A Court of Federal Claims decision in April required GSA to rethink its approach to OASIS+, as well as several other acquisition vehicles, where it wasn’t going to consider price as an evaluation factor in the RFP. But the judge’s decision forced GSA to change and possibly opened the door to protests.

OASIS+ will replace the popular OASIS professional services contract. Since fiscal 2022 alone, agencies obligated almost $25 billion through 873 task orders against the contract. And since GSA launched OASIS in 2015, agencies have obligated more than $67.4 billion through more than 4,000 task orders.

SEWP VI is on

While OASIS+ is driving toward the end of the beginning, NASA just kicked off the beginning of SEWP VI.

The program office released the first draft of version six of the governmentwide acquisition contract’s solicitation on Friday.

“Potential offerors are encouraged to comment on all aspects of the draft solicitation, including the requirements, schedules, proposal instructions, and evaluation approaches, any perceived safety, occupational health, security (including information technology security), environmental, export control and/or other programmatic risk issues associated with the performance of the work,” NASA wrote in the draft solicitation. “Potential offerors should identify any unnecessary or inefficient requirements and are also encouraged to comment on the draft RFP’s unique terms and conditions, exhibits and the clarity of the instructions and evaluation criteria.”

SEWP VI will, again, be a 10-year contract and expand to more than just products and related services, but offer more complete IT services. The draft RFP includes three categories:

IT solutions to include products in the information and communications technology (ICT) and audio visual category.
Enterprise-wide IT solutions and services, to include everything from managed services to program integration to cloud and cyber services.
IT professional services solutions focused on ICT and audio visual services.

Comments on the draft RFP are due by Oct. 2. NASA is planning an industry day in College Park, Maryland on Oct. 18. NASA says it expects to issue the final RFP in February and make the awards by October 2024.

Over the last 30 years, NASA’s SEWP program has been one of the most successful governmentwide acquisition contracts. The latest version, SEWP V, which is in the eight year out of 10, has 142 companies, 100 of which are small businesses, and expects to top more than $10 billion in sales this year.