Reporter's Notebook

As the acquisition world turns: 4 plot twists in the latest storyline

NIH and DHS close down long-time services, while NASA and the Navy are getting new characters ready for their debuts.

October 30, 2026 6:14 pm

8 min read

Welcome to another episode of “As the Acquisition World Turns.” It’s been too long since we last caught up with our cast of characters, but given several plotlines are unfolding today, it was time to catch up with this soap opera.

Today’s episode features the end of an era, the next evolution of a popular contract and two changes to long-time acquisition programs.

Like any good soap opera, killing off a character usually happens suddenly and in dramatic fashion. But the end of the National Institutes of Health’s IT Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC) has been in the works for several months. Yesterday was the last day NITAAC officially existed.

NITAAC said agencies can no longer award task orders against any of its governmentwide acquisition contracts, CIO-SP3, CIO-SP3 Small Business and CIO-CS.

NITAAC outlined the short-term actions it will take to wind down and shift task orders either to the General Services Administration or the Department of Health and Human Services contracting offices.

Ricky Clark, the director of NITAAC, told me in September that the reasons to end this 30-year-old office and associated GWACs came down to a simple reason. NITAAC found through a multi-agency review that there was better than 90% duplication of what it offered and what was already available through IT contract vehicles managed by GSA and NASA.

One procurement expert with experience in government and industry said two things drove the decision to end NITAAC.

The first, of course, came from President Donald Trump’s March 2025 executive order, “Eliminating Waste and Saving Taxpayer Dollars by Consolidating Procurement.”

But the second, and this is probably among the biggest drivers, was HHS leadership supported the decision.

“NITAAC has a couple of large, well-established programs and a seat at table with GSA and NASA. That makes the decision to shut it down at a different level than these other contracts we’ve seen across government,” said the source, who requested anonymity because they didn’t get permission to speak to the press. “The EO is working to some extent because HHS leadership weighed in and said, ‘We don’t need to be in this business.’”

Without a doubt, NITAAC was a successful GWAC over the last 30 years. Clark likes to highlight NITAAC’s customer service earning a rating of 98% approval.

But at the same time, the decision to close down NITAAC came down to the simple fact it wasn’t needed any more with the overlap and health IT technology just becoming technology.

“I’ll give the vendors who were a part of NITAAC a thanks because over the last 30 years, they made NITAAC the place to be. It’s been used by a lot of other GWACS as a benchmark because of the service that was provided. We could not have provided that service without our contract holders. So, for them, I say thank you,” Clark said back in September. “Secondly, there is an opportunity with GSA, and we’ll be having a lot of industry days to gather a lot of feedback, so I would encourage contractors to be a part of those, and then avoid any concerns that they may have if they don’t currently have a GSA vehicle. I think there’s a perfect opportunity to provide on-ramps to GSA vehicles. The capability that they developed here at NITAAC is one that can be very, very useful for the GWAC community.”

Give a toast to Clark and his team at NITAAC this weekend and congratulate them for a successful 30-year run.

A lead character’s makeover

Like any good soap opera, there are certain “stars” who are central to the story, and sometimes, they need a new story line.

NASA SEWP’s new story line is version six of this venerable GWAC.

NASA is ramping up its new contract that now offers products AND services. It will launch the SEWP VI website on Nov. 1, and recently released a new resource guide that features a new online catalog, an enhanced quote request tool and other resources. SEWP VI’s order period also starts on Nov. 1 and goes through Oct. 31, 2036. Each of the three contracts have a $20 billion ceiling.

The program office made awards this summer, choosing 1,490 vendors and making 2,115 awards across three categories of the contract functional areas. The awards completed a two-year effort to move to the new GWAC, but also add services to the mix.

The current version of SEWP has seen continued growth over the last several years. NASA says SEWP V saw $14.5 billion in obligations in fiscal 2026, which is 20% more than it saw in 2025.

The future of NASA SEWP still remains in question to some extent.

The procurement expert says the GWAC isn’t going away, but the transition to GSA seems to be picking up steam.

“OMB wants GSA to have at least one competing governmentwide contract vehicle. They believe GSA programs work better when there is outside competition,” the source said. “At the same time, GSA is working with NASA and have people embedded in the SEWP office working on the transition. GSA elected to wait for SEWP VI to get up and running before it took the transition into another gear. But now that awards are out and the protest period has mostly cleared, I’d expect GSA to put merger actions into higher gear.”

Whether GSA actually takes over SEWP still is to be determined, but the launch of version six shows just how this star will continue to drive the storyline.

Navy’s change of direction

Characters in soap operas come and go, but the great ones have decades of moving between an antagonist and a protagonist.

The Navy Enterprise Network is that character everyone loves to hate.

It started in the early 2000s as the Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI). The service awarded the NMCI to Electronic Data Systems (EDS), which HP Enterprise Services bought in 2008. From the start, this character made people unhappy. A 2007 survey of users said NCMI was unstable, slow and frustrating.

The Navy started to move on from NCMI to Next Generation Enterprise Network (NGEN) in 2013 with an award to a team of contractors led by HP. NGEN was better than NMCI and now is part of a contract that Leidos manages.

NGEN eventually was absorbed under the Naval Enterprise Networks (NEN) program.

And this is where our story takes its next turn.

The Navy issued a white paper outlining its initial ideas and what outcomes it’s considering as it takes an entire portfolio of systems into a new model, specifically away from a lead systems integrator approach and toward one that is run by the government with support from industry.

“NEN is moving toward an enterprise model that aligns acquisition, engineering, service delivery, cybersecurity and portfolio decisions around mission outcomes. The approach is intended to preserve continuity while making it easier to introduce new technology, respond to threats, improve services and change providers or solutions when the evidence supports doing so,” the Navy wrote in the notice. “The government seeks to retain and fulfill its ownership responsibilities while determining the appropriate mix of government and contractor operations across the enterprise. Industry engagement and market research will help inform these decisions, with the goal of strengthening enterprise integration, accelerating secure capability delivery and minimizing transition risk.”

The move away from the lead system integrator model is one that DoD, and really many agencies, have oscillated between over the past 20 years.

NCMI and NGEN were both using the LSI model.

The Navy says its initial thinking is to evolve NEN into an integrated service ecosystem.

“A user may experience one seamless service even though delivery depends on multiple capabilities, providers and technologies,” the Navy stated. “NEN therefore focuses on the end-to-end outcome for the user while allowing each capability to use the delivery and acquisition model that best fits its maturity, commercial availability, operational risk and need for customization.”

The Navy isn’t looking for a comments or feedback quite yet, but says it will give industry opportunities to provide feedback through ongoing and future market research activities, including the NEN Supply Chain Management (SCM) request for information (RFI), as well as other industry engagement opportunities.

DHS says goodbye to an old friend

And like any good serial show, there are times when we have to say goodbye to an important, but background character. In this case that character is the Department of Homeland Security’s acquisition forecast system. DHS says it no longer is posting new solicitations or information to its acquisition forecast system today as of 4 p.m.

It will launch the updated Advance Acquisition Planning: Forecast of Contract Opportunities on Nov. 5.

DHS launched the former system in 2011 and it looks like it hasn’t been updated in 15 years. The agency surely improved the back-end infrastructure and the functionality, but the look and feel is definitely mid-internet era.

Over the last 18 months or so, figuring out what agencies are forecasting to buy has been more difficult, to say the least. This is especially true as agencies saw a significant number of contracting officers leave under the deferred resignation program or other ways.

The Office of Personnel Management says 7,892 contracting officers in the 1102 job series left in fiscal 2025 and another 1,329 left in 2026. In all, there are now 37,316 employees in the 1102 job series, down from 44,563 employees in January 2025.

At DHS, OPM says there are 1,417 in the 1102 job series today, down from 1,566 in 2025.

As agencies have fewer employees, keeping procurement forecasts up to date has suffered, so it’s good to see DHS committing to not only keeping the data flowing, but modernizing the user’s experience.