How a Support Recompete Changed Who Reads DISA's Cloud Proposals

DISA posted Amendment 0003 to its JWCC Unified Cloud Marketplace solicitation at 5:09 Thursday evening. Most of it is data-item housekeeping: government-furnished property reporting pulled off CDRL A008 and given its own CDRL A011, two CLINs repointed at the new one, a revised PWS carrying four conforming edits.

One line in the summary is not housekeeping.

"Volume I, Tab G Support Contractor Proposal Access Consent from Chickasaw Strategic Pointe, LLC to Blue Sky Innovative Solutions, LLC"

Thirteen days before proposals close on a $21.6 billion ceiling, the agency changed one of the two companies that get to see them.

What Tab G actually asks for

Solicitation HC105026R0001 comes out of DITCO-Scott's PS85 Cloud Contracting shop, unrestricted, NAICS 518210, offers due 11:00 a.m. Central on Nov. 18. Volume I of the proposal runs seven tabs, and the seventh is a consent form.

The Offeror "shall submit a statement confirming whether permission is granted to the contractor support personnel, identified below, to access the Offeror's proposal." Two companies are then named. The solicitation adds that they work "under existing contracts with the Government," that they "will provide administrative services only," and that this "will not include analyzing or evaluating proposals."

Offerors "may choose to execute a proposal access agreement directly with these support contractors." So the instrument is a yes-or-no, with an optional private contract on top.

Here's the catch. The solicitation never says what happens if you answer no.

We searched the whole conformed document for the consequence, and there isn't one. Tab G is absent from the three Gate criteria in Section M, absent from the technical and management subfactors, absent from the price evaluation.

Nothing in Section M makes consent a condition of award, and nothing in Section L makes refusal a deficiency.

The agency asks, and the record stops there.