Page 14 - FCW, July 2020

NICK WAKEMAN is editor- Commentary|BY NICK WAKEMAN in-chiefofWashington
Technology.
Making sense of DynCorp’s run of contract protests
Is an eye-catching collection of open protests an aggressive attempt to hold onto business or a confluence of coincidences?
When scanning the daily docket of bid protests on the Government Accountability Office’s website, it catches one’s eye to see five open protests from one company.
When that company is DynCorp International, which earlier this year lost its final bid protest of one of
its largest contracts, your instinct
is to ask what’s going on. Is this a desperate strategy to hang onto anything to make up for the lost contract? Has the company gone protest mad, and is it just challenging everything it can?
The truth is much simpler and much less dramatic.
The protests do not point to any extra attempt by the company to hold onto business, a DynCorp spokesman said. DynCorp is following its philosophy of pushing back on procurement decisions that it feels went against the company unfairly.
In one case, DynCorp was awarded Customs and Border Protection’s $1.3 billion National Aviation Maintenance and Logistics Services contract in May 2019. But the incumbent, PAE, and another bidder, Vertex Aerospace, filed protests. Among its claims, PAE argued that DynCorp’s price was too low to meet the Department of Homeland Security’s requirements.
CBP took a corrective action that allowed the bidders to resubmit bids. DynCorp in turn protested
the corrective action, which was denied by GAO.
DynCorp argued that DHS was
allowing the bidders to make “unrestricted proposal revisions,” according to the GAO decision.
The decision is a real head- scratcher in that competitors know DynCorp’s pricing strategy thanks
to the debriefings. But GAO said
the disclosure was a proper part of the debriefings. At the same time, DynCorp wasn’t allowed to learn the pricing strategies of its competitors before submitting its new proposal.
In arguing for the corrective action, PAE said it wanted to submit new pricing because the delays and
DynCorp is pushing back on procurement decisions that it feels went against the company unfairly.
other changes to the solicitation would allow it to bid a lower price, according to the GAO decision.
In May, CBP awarded the contract to PAE. That led to the current open DynCorp protest at GAO. A decision is due by Sept. 30.
The DynCorp spokesman
said three other protests involve contracts where the company submitted a proposal at the same time it protested terms of the solicitation.
significant loss when it wasn’t picked for one of the Army’s Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP) V awards in April 2019. The company lost its protest at GAO and then at the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.
But the company made up for the lost revenue when it secured a pair of Army aviation support contracts worth a combined $3.5 billion, the spokesman said. Those contracts are more emblematic of where the company wants to go, he added. DynCorp is focusing on more work that is long term and based in the U.S., instead of tying its growth to overseas contingency contracts.
Much of DynCorp’s LOGCAP IV work was in Afghanistan, and that is expected to decrease in the coming years, the spokesman said.
So the bunching up of five
open bid protests has more to do with timing and coincidence than anything else. There was a sixth protest involving work at Fort Bliss in Texas, but GAO denied DynCorp’s protest.
Besides the CBP aviation contract, the other protests involve contracts and task orders with the Army and the Navy. They should all be resolved in the coming months, according to the GAO docket. n
14 July 2020 FCW.COM
DynCorp certainly suffered a
Washington Technology, a sister publication to FCW, covers all the ins and outs of the IT contracting community. Learn more at WashingtonTechnology.com.