Nobody Got to Bid on $1.9 Billion of Mess Halls
The Marine Corps competed its garrison mess halls in 2018 and got four offers per lot. Tuesday's board replaced them with a directly negotiated award to a state labor department, $1.9 billion guaranteed and $4.06 billion if the option runs. The statute that did it turns ninety this year, and it is still moving.
Two of the entries on Tuesday's Pentagon board went to state governments.
Not a state university system, not a state guard. The Colorado Department of Labor and Employment was awarded $1,904,796,810 to run Marine Corps garrison food services at 46 mess halls and seven satellite facilities across the continental United States. Six lines down, under Air Force, the State of New Jersey picked up a maximum $75,370,213 requirements contract for full food services at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst.
Colorado's award covers mess halls in California, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Arizona, Maryland and the District of Columbia.
It covers no mess halls in Colorado.
"How does a state labor department end up holding the largest food services contract in the Marine Corps?"
What the Marine Corps Stopped Competing
Sodexo has held this work since Oct. 1, 2018, in two lots. M9549418C0016 has obligated $944,210,729.28 against a Washington headquarters place of performance; M9549418C0018 has obligated $913,816,628.05 out of Camp Lejeune. Both went full and open competition under solicitations M9549418R0002 and M9549418R0003, no set-aside, four offers received on each. Both run out on Sept. 30, 2026.
Eight years, $1,858,027,357.33 obligated, and a four-way race to win it.
The successor, M95494-26-D-0001, is a single-award IDIQ with a hybrid pricing structure, a five-year base to September 2031, and one five-year option that would carry it to $4,064,897,053. Here is the board's own competition sentence, verbatim: the contract "was not competitively procured but rather directly negotiated and awarded pursuant to the authorities at 10 U.S. Code 3204(a)(5) and 20 U.S. Code Section 107."
So the bidding stopped and the number went up (chart below).
Annualize it. Sodexo's eight-year run works out to $232,253,420 a year. The new base is $380,959,362 a year, 64% more, and $406,489,705 a year if the option runs the full ten. Comparing obligations-to-date against an announced contract value is a bit of an oversimplification for time, though on a finished eight-year services run the obligations are the best proxy anyone has for what the work actually cost.
One more number off the board, because it tells you what kind of instrument this is: $10,000 in fiscal 2026 military personnel funds was obligated at award. On $1.9 billion.
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