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...

The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) recently announced the award of an almost-$140 million contract for “commercial trucks and trailers,” to California-based Certified Stainless Service Inc. (doing business as West-Mark). While awarded through DLA, the agency expects the customer-base to span all of the U.S. Military branches and will even include other Federal agencies. West-Mark will build the equipment for use “within the Contiguous United States, Alaska, Hawaii, the outlying areas and throughout Europe, Africa and the Pacific.” The globe-spanning equipment...

While DISA continues to work on awards for the Systems Engineering, Technology and Engineering (SETI) contract vehicle, the agency took an opportunity to ask interested parties to contribute ideas to a new “Innovative Contracting Playbook” which it is putting together. Inspired by the successful (and well publicized) NASA Space Poop Challenge, DISA is asking for input (in any format) on non-traditional contracting strategies it could utilize in the future. Mainly, it wants to know if contractors would participate in a...

Solely for “business planning purposes only,” the General Services Administration released a Request for Information (RFI) for Entity Validation Services, services currently fulfilled with the use of the Data Universal Number System (DUNS). While in an early stage, this could indicate the Federal government’s interest in moving away from the proprietary Dun and Bradstreet (D&B) identification system. The RFI specifically mentions the necessity for open access to the data by the public and the Federal government, which illustrates a key...