Eleven Years on a Ten-Year Ordering Period

Wednesday's Pentagon board carried one line that answers a question the desk has been circling for two years:

"What happens to a sole-source sustainment IDIQ when its ordering period finally runs out?"

Nothing happens. The Missile Defense Agency awarded modification P00038 to Raytheon's HQ0147-18-D-0001 on October 21, a "non-competitive, two-year extension" that moves the ordering period from October 31, 2026 to October 31, 2028 and lifts the ceiling from $2,605,033,000 to $2,999,033,000. The work is operations and sustainment on the AN/TPY-2 radar fleet, and $112,309,403 of fiscal 2027 money went out the door with it.

The award landed 10 days before the window it extends would have closed.

And this is the second time.

The contract was signed October 27, 2017 with an ordering period running to October 31, 2024. That date moved to 2026, and now it moves to 2028, which puts the whole thing at 11.01 years (chart below).

The Line at Ten Years

10 U.S.C. 3403(f) is the provision that matters here, and it is two sentences long. An agency head may set a task or delivery order contract at up to five years and extend it by option or modification. Then: "The total contract period as extended may not exceed 10 years unless such head of an agency determines in writing that exceptional circumstances necessitate a longer contract period."

Ten years from October 27, 2017 is October 27, 2027. The new ordering period ends 370 days after that.

So one of two things is true. Either a written exceptional-circumstances determination exists at the head-of-agency level, or the extension went out without one.

The first is far more likely, and MDA has every reason to have papered it. Worth noticing, though: the 2024 extension stopped at 9.01 years, comfortably inside the ceiling, and this one is the first that needs the escape hatch.

That determination is written. It is not published.