Decisions that had been expected this month on protests over two major Navy contract awards could be delayed by more than two weeks because of the government shutdown that prompted the furloughing of the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) workforce.
Like most of the federal government, GAO employees were furloughed on Oct. 1 and didn’t return to work until Thursday, hours after Congress voted to end the shutdown. The oversight agency that rules on industry protests is scheduled to issue determinations on the Navy’s next-generation intranet by Wednesday and the next-generation jammer by Oct. 28, dates within the standard 100-day timeframe.
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| An EA-18G Growler in foreground. Photo by Boeing |
Ralph White, the head of the GAO’s protest office, said that while the agency’s goal remains to complete the protests on time, it also has the option of delaying the dates for protest decisions by the number of furlough days–in this case 16.
“We are trying to meet the hundred-day deadline on every case in progress that we can,” he told Defense Daily. “But if we can’t meet that 100 days deadline because we were not here, we will consider extending the deadline for every day that the government was closed.”
At stake are protests filed by partners Harris Corp [HRS] and Computer Sciences Corporation [CSC] over the Navy’s award of the Next Generation Enterprise Network (NGEN) to Hewlett-Packard [HP], and BAE Systems’ protest against Raytheon’s [RTN] win in the competition to supply the Navy’s Next Generation Jammer (NJG).
The cases are among the roughly 280 that were underway at GAO when the shutdown began, White said. An additional 200 cases were electronically filed during the shutdown but could not be processed until the furloughs ended, White said.
Work on both Navy programs has been on hold since the protests were lodged in July. The Navy awarded a $320 million NGEN contract to HP on June 28 that could reach a value exceeding $3 billion, and around the same time awarded Raytheon an initial contract of $280 million for NGJ that could also stretch into the billions.
NGEN is the follow-on to the Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI), which is currently operated by HP, and provides secure, net-centric data and services to 800,000 Navy and Marine Corps personnel and connects 400,000 workstations.
Raytheon also defeated Northrop Grumman [NOC] for NGJ, but the latter chose not to protest. The next-generation jammer is to replace the Northrop Grumman-built ALQ-99 and be installed on EA-18G Growler electronic attack aircraft. The first NGJ is set to arrive in 2020.