146 Orders Are Expiring on Vehicles That Already Closed

A task order does not die when its vehicle does.

That is the whole of FAR 52.216-22(d), and it is why an IDIQ's ordering window gets so little attention outside the shop that lives inside it:

"Any order issued during the effective period of this contract and not completed within that period shall be completed by the Contractor within the time specified in the order."

The work finishes. The invoices clear. Nobody downstream notices the vehicle went dark two years ago.

Then the order expires, and the follow-on has to go somewhere.

We ran the whole board against that question this evening. Of the 1,162 major DoD contracts on our expiration pipeline (over $50M, period of performance ending between April 3, 2027 and September 24, 2028), 604 are orders sitting under an indefinite-delivery contract. We pulled all 455 distinct parent vehicles off the award record, one call apiece, and set each vehicle's last date to order against the end date of the order hanging from it.

245 of the 604 end after their vehicle's ordering window shuts, carrying $39.08B in obligations (chart below).

For 146 of those, $23.57B, the window is already shut today.

The window gates one thing, and it's the one you need

A closed ordering period costs the incumbent nothing on work it already holds. The order runs to its own end date, options and all.

What a closed window stops is the next order. 52.216-18(a) is the clause that sets the dates orders "may be issued from," and when they run out, the only moves left are off-vehicle:

• the requirement moves to a successor vehicle, where the incumbent may or may not hold a seat
• the office stands up a standalone competition: a solicitation, an evaluation and a protest window instead of a fair-opportunity notice to five holders
• the office bridges, sole-source, and buys itself the time to do one of the first two

Median overhang on the 245 is 562 days. 159 of them run more than a year past their vehicle's last order date, 36 more than three.

Here's the catch, and it cuts toward the government side of the table.

99 of the 245 sit on vehicles that are still open right now and close before the order ends. Those are the ones an office can still solve cheaply, by ordering the follow-on in-vehicle while it can.

That deadline belongs to the contracting officer, and nothing in the award record flags it.