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  • May 9, 2024

Important Updates on DHS PACTS II, GSA Ascend and VA T4NG2

by Barbara Kinosky

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PACTS III

DHS issued amendments to its PACTS III solicitation to address the GAO protests challenging the past performance evaluation methodology. DHS will now allow companies to submit non-federal projects and projects performed as first-tier subcontractors for past performance. DHS will allow bidders to update their proposals. In my opinion, DHS should now allow new proposal too for those who did not bid because of the original past performance requirements which were more stringent. A pre-award protest may be in order.

PACTS III is a small business set-aside contract with an $8.4 billion ceiling over up to 10 years. The acronym stands for Program Management, Administrative, Clerical, and Technical Services.

GSA ASCEND

GSA’s Information Technology Category is moving forward with the next steps for the Ascend Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) Pool 1. Ascend is a competitive, multiple-award, multi-agency BPA that addresses the governmentwide need for cloud solutions, including:

  • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud solutions;
  • Software as a Service (SaaS) cloud solutions; and,
  • Cloud related IT professional services.

The Draft PWS and associated documents can be found on eBuy under RFQ1694175.

VA T4NG2

At last count there are over twenty protesters at the Court of Federal Claims (COFC) protesting the Veteran’s Affairs’ Transformation Twenty-One Total Technology Next Generation 2 (T4NG2). Most of the protests were originally filed at the GAO. But when a new protester filed at the COFC, GAO dismissed all the protests to avoid potentially different decisions on the same issues. Centre Law is representing multiple protesters.

On Halloween, VA announced its T4NG2 contract awards which were limited to 30 companies. The vehicle has a $60.7 billion ceiling over up to 10 years. T4NG2 and its predecessor vehicles are the VA’s primary vehicle for IT services. Billions of dollars of task orders were awarded under the predecessor contract vehicle T4NG. Congress questioned the VA earlier on why the awards were capped at thirty.