Incumbent subcontractors that worked under one Department of Energy prime contract won’t necessarily be kept on under follow-up contracts, unless they were members of a winning proposal team, a top nuclear-cleanup procurement official said this week.
Some smaller companies at the Hanford Site in Washington State “were surprised” when DOE ordered new prime contractors who took over cleanup and site support services in January to competitively award work these small businesses had done under subcontracts to the old primes.
These small businesses “were surprised, when we said [to the primes] ‘no you have to compete the work,’” Norbert Doyle, deputy assistant secretary at DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) for acquisition and project management, said Thursday.
Doyle spoke during an all-online session at the annual Waste Management Symposia.
This controversial change in policy — effective with the transition in January to the Amentum-led Central Plateau Cleanup Company and the Leidos-led Hanford Mission Integration Solutions — has triggered blowback from local small business owners around Hanford and brought scrutiny down on the Biden administration’s DOE leadership nominees from Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.).
Doyle said that while primes sometimes need to augment their staff with small business subcontractors, those subcontracts are not necessarily guaranteed over the 10-year life of the prime agreement.
Still, Doyle allowed that DOE could have done a better job of explaining the situation to businesses at Hanford — something his boss Dae Chung, EM’S associate principal deputy assistant secretary for corporate services, also said this week at Waste Management. Still, Doyle and Chung both defended EM’s record for supporting small businesses, including firms owned by women, veterans and minorities.
Meanwhile, Cantwell, Hanford’s main lever over the Biden administration during the president’s drive to staff up his cabinet agencies, has said that while the policy change at Hanford might be beneficial in the long run, it has led in the short term to cancellation of some small business deals.
Cantwell brought her concerns to the attention of David Turk, the Biden administration’s nominee for deputy energy secretary, who promised to look into the issue if confirmed. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee voted to advance his nomination Thursday, though the full Senate had yet to schedule a final confirmation vote at deadline.
