While federal employees are generally reimbursed for days the government is shutdown thanks to legislation from Congress, contractors are not so lucky. Depending on the percentage of federal work companies take on and how large their commitments are, a shutdown can cause major headaches for a business. It’s relatively obvious that this is affecting large companies performing various military and IT contracts for the government, but it is also detrimental to thousands of low-income contractors working in federal buildings like...

Tyndall Air Force Base, based in Panama City, sustained heavy damage when Hurricane Michael reached Florida without much warning. What does this mean for federal contractors who currently have contracts with Tyndall AFB? Per EZGovOpps records, there are currently 148 ongoing contracts with a value of 5.6 billion that expire in the next three years. Vendors like L3 Communication, Science Applications International, and TASC are likely concerned that these current contracts would be continued during the rebuilding process. With the temporary...

If you’re wary that the mid-term elections will throw a monkey wrench in the F.Y. 2019 defense appropriations and authorization bills, you certainly won’t be the only one. The results of the election will greatly influence control of the House, and how many dollars will be earmarked for defense contractors, who are one of the biggest winners from the Trump presidency in terms of dollars and cents. Should we experience a “Blue Wave” and Democrats take control, defense contracts would...

Back in June of 2017, the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee moved to change control of space missions to a new military branch (rather than under US Air Force command). Things are now picking up steam with Trump ordering the Pentagon to create this new service branch for space military operations yesterday (6/18/18). This would be the sixth branch of the U.S. armed forces. “We are going to have the Air Force and we are going to have a...

After a sudden announcement of a $10 billion, sole-source contract with Cerner last year for a new Electronic Health Record (EHR) system, then-Secretary of the VA Shulkin faced questions from other industry members and Congress over the decision. After the dismissal of Secretary Shulkin in March and reports of shortcomings with the new Cerner-led EHR system at DOD this month, acting-Secretary of the VA Robert Wilkie announced that the department had finally signed the Cerner contract on May 17th, 2018....

After the government’s swift efforts to remove Kaspersky products from federal IT systems, DHS reported that all federal agencies have removed Kaspersky software from their systems. DHS is now reportedly focusing on the supply chain for IT products to ensure Kaspersky software is not embedded in products in early stages of the supply chain. Other agencies are also planning standards for supply chain risk management, and Congress has drafted requirements in a funding bill for FY19 for certain agencies to consult...

On April 25th, the Defense Information Systems Agency announced a new upgrade to DOD’s enterprise network known as the Defense Information Systems Network (DISN). The new upgrade, named the Next Generation Optical Transport, will provide a huge bandwidth boost to the network, from 10 GB per second to 100 GB per second, as well as provide “improved infrastructure resiliency, service delivery node resiliency, encryption, and transitions critical legacy components to an internet protocol-based Ethernet infrastructure.” DISA tied to the effort, to be completed...

On Monday, April 23rd, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) announced in a press release a new complaint to the Department of Labor on behalf of General Dynamics IT (GDIT) employees, alleging the company misclassified and, in turn, underpaid call center employees working under a call center contract for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). CWA estimated the wages owed could exceed $100 million since the start of the contract in 2013. The contract for “Contact Center Operations”...

On the last business day in March this year, DOD ended the month with a huge spike in announcements of major foreign military sales (FMS). In total, the 13 contract awards and modifications totaled over $2.2 billion, for work from 8 contractors. The highest value contract awarded that day went to Boeing for “long-lead non-recurring engineering required to develop a baseline configuration for the production and delivery of 22 F/A-18E and 6 F/A-18F Super Hornets,” along with long-lead radar warning receivers...

A few months after we published our introduction to DOD’s new Other Transaction Authority (OTA), DOD announced a huge $950 million OTA award to REAN for streamlined cloud solutions, after the company’s success transitioning TRANSCOM systems to the cloud. The next month, after a GAO protest and public scrutiny, DOD announced to the press on March 5th that they would be scaling back the deal both in payment and scope: limiting the ceiling to $65 million, and narrowing performance to...