A silent end for NITAAC?
Gettyimages.com/ Penpak Ngamsathain
By
Nick Wakeman
Both websites for the National Institutes of Health's CIO-SP and CIO-CS contract vehicles are dark, leading to questions over whether the long-time contract vehicles are being shuttered.
The NIH IT Acquisition and Assessment Center has fallen silent in the past few weeks.
NITAAC's public-facing website has disappeared and the the National Institutes of Health's press office is also silent. An apparent communications blackout is in place across the agency.
NITAAC is home to several large, government-wide acquisition contracts. CIO-SP3 and CIO-SP3 Small Business provide IT services and solutions to agencies, and CIO-CS is used to purchase IT hardware and related solutions.
NITAAC is running a recompete for the fourth iteration of CIO-SP, but the competition has been mired in protests at the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. NITAAC has told the court it is working on a corrective action for CIO-SP4.
But the agency is struggling to complete that process, according to court filings. Judge Thompson Dietz has extended the deadline until July 2.
Dietz's order lists several of NITAAC’s struggles including the retirement of the source selection authority, unnamed changes in agency policy, and issues with the source selection tool repository. There also is an issue with the “time-intensiveness of the review of the allegations concerning Historically Black Colleges and Universities.”
The filings offer no details and as I wrote earlier, NIH's press office is incommunicado.
One NIH source told me that everyone is in the dark about what happens next with CIO-SP4 and NITAAC's entire portfolio.
The public websites for NITAAC are down, including web pages that explain its mission and offer resources such as NITAAC University and assisted acquisitions. Web pages built for specific agencies also have gone dark including those for the Energy Department, Navy and Homeland Security Department.
Agencies can still place orders under the CIO-SP3 and CIO-CS vehicles. The portal page for NITAAC’s electronic government ordering system, e-GOS, is still up.
The phone number listed on the portal page goes directly into hold music before a recording suggests contacting a contracting officer or leaving a voicemail message.
The scrutiny of government contracts is increasing through the Department of Government Efficiency, which is emphasizing cost savings and reducing redundancies. There also is the push to consolidate more procurement activity through the General Services Administration.
That could spell the end for NITAAC and their contract vehicles like CIO-SP and CIO-CS.
If that’s the case, it seems like a quiet end for a contracting program that saw billions in transactions flow through it. More a whimper than a bang.