Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
11/14/2014
The National Nuclear Security Administration is not planning to release the names of the Source Selection Authority or Source Evaluation Board for its Kansas City National Security Campus procurement, the agency said late last week. “We consider the name of the source selection authority and any source evaluation board member names to be procurement sensitive,” NNSA spokeswoman Shelley Laver told NS&D Monitor. “This is consistent with general practice across the Government. It allows the SEB to focus on their work without fielding questions that should be directed to the contracting officer.”
The decision, however, appears to go against historical precedent set by the agency. The NNSA publicized the SEB chair and SEB members for its most recent major procurement, the Y-12/Pantex competition, though it shied away from revealing the SSA once the contract award was protested. It also refused to name replacement members of the SEB aside from new chairman Bob Scott as the procurement stretched longer and longer. Prior to Y-12/Pantex, the agency named the SEB chairmen for the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratory procurements.
Industry officials have pressed the NNSA to release the names of the SEB and SSA, arguing that more information and transparency could foster competition for the contract. That is especially true in light of the Y-12/Pantex procurement, where NNSA went to great lengths to defend a controversial decision by the second of three SSAs on the procurement, Michael Lempke, to use his personal experience with Bechtel as a discriminator to select Bechtel-led Consolidated Nuclear Security for the contract. “Fairness requires that people should know who that is so that they can discern their chances with that SSA,” one industry official told NS&D Monitor.
NNSA Confident in Competition
With questions about competition hovering over the Kansas City procurement, Laver said the NNSA was confident it would receive significant interest for the contract. When Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technologies won the contract in 2000, it was the only bidder, but this time around, the contract could draw interest from top Pentagon contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Raytheon along with IBM and Babcock & Wilcox, industry officials have speculated. Laver said the NNSA received interest from “several potential offerors” after issuing a Request for Information in June. “The RFI also requested industry input on potential barriers to competition as well as suggestions to streamline and improve the procurement process,” Laver said. “NNSA considered the input from industry in its decision and in its approach to the competition, and NNSA believes the resulting procurement will be highly competitive.”
