DOE Faces Protest Over Latest Effort to Award LM Support Services Contract

The Department of Energy is facing at least one challenge to its latest effort to award the new support services contract for the Office of Legacy Management. A team led by Wastren Advantage Inc. has filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office over DOE’s move to award the contract to Navarro Research and Engineering. The WAI team, which includes incumbent S.M. Stoller (now known as Stoller Newport News Nuclear), confirmed the protest yesterday but declined to provide additional comment. DOE did not respond to a request for comment yesterday.

Navarro was deemed the latest winner of the new Legacy Management support contract, valued at approximately $257 million, in late January. The move marked DOE’s third award decision for the new contract, which was set aside for small businesses, having previously announced twice that Portage was the winner. DOE initially awarded the contract to Portage in April 2013, leading to protests from the Navarro and WAI teams. In response to the first challenge, DOE chose in May 2013 to take corrective action by re-evaluating all eight bids, and then chose again in early 2014 to award the new contract to Portage. Both Navarro and the WAI-Stoller team again protested DOE’s decision, and in the spring of 2014, the GAO sustained Navarro’s protest but denied WAI-Stoller’s. As a result DOE again re-evaluated the bids submitted for the new contract, and to date the Department has not publicly provided details as to why it chose to shift course and award the contract the third time to Navarro.