RecompetedThe Seat Next to Leidos
The Defense Health Agency put its deployment bench up unrestricted, took 29 complete offers and handed out twelve seats. Two of the twelve went to small businesses, and the agency's own list marks them with an asterisk: a Frederick woman-owned shop with $351 million of mostly civilian health IT behind it, and a San Antonio 8(a) firm whose entire prime record until now was five contracts nobody else was asked to bid.
If you chased the Defense Health Agency's deployment work this summer, you already know the shape of the outcome. Twelve seats, 29 complete offers, and seventeen companies that went home with a debrief.
What you could not get until this week was the seat-by-seat record. DHA posted nine of the twelve award notices to SAM between Monday evening and lunchtime today, 74 days after the August 6 award date, each one carrying the holder's UEI, its CAGE code and its contract number.
Read the agency's own list of the twelve and two names carry an asterisk. The footnote underneath says what the asterisk means.
"*small business"
They are the first and last names on the list, and they hold the first and last contract numbers in the series.
Who The Asterisks Are
A Square Group LLC of Frederick, Maryland took HT003826DE002. The federal record designates it a woman-owned small business, and it also holds a seat in the women-owned pool on GSA's Polaris vehicle.
Vista Global Solutions, LLC of San Antonio took HT003826DE013. It is an 8(a) program participant and an Alaska Native Corporation owned firm on the same record.
The other ten seats went to Accenture Federal, CACI, Deep Mile Networks, Deloitte Consulting, GDIT, Great Hill Solutions, Kearney & Company, Leidos, Peraton and Planned Systems International.
No set-aside applied to any of it. The solicitation went out unrestricted, and all twelve seats came out of the same 29-offer field.
From One Offer to Twenty-Nine
Vista Global's public record is five prime contracts worth $12,890,054.47 between them, and every single one was solicited from exactly one source and drew exactly one offer (chart below).
Four were 8(a) sole source awards. The fifth, and the first, was its 2022 Ready Reliable Care support work at DHA itself, coded "not available for competition" with no set-aside used.
That is a perfectly ordinary way to build an 8(a) book, and it is the path the program exists to provide. What it does not do is tell a contracting officer how the company prices against a field.
Now it has. The same customer that had been handing Vista Global single-source task orders since 2022 put a bench up unrestricted, let 29 companies at it, and the San Antonio firm came out holding one of twelve seats alongside Leidos and CACI.
Worth noting on the timing: its original DHA contract ran out on September 29, three weeks ago.
The Civilian Book That Just Crossed Over
A Square Group arrives from somewhere else entirely. Its prime record runs to $351,124,249.97 across 30 contracts, which is 27 times Vista Global's whole book.
Almost none of it is defense. The split:
- Health and Human Services: $289,458,428.07, or 82.4%
- Homeland Security: $38,260,704.31
- Veterans Affairs: $9,435,704.68
- Defense: $9,431,075.18, or 2.7%, across seven contracts
Its single biggest award is a $206,653,163.63 CMS task order off NITAAC CIO-SP3, and the FPDS record on it reads total small business set-aside, five offers received. Its largest defense work before this is $8,109,283.14 of DevSecOps at DISA, also a small business set-aside, that one against ten offers.
So this is a shop that spent a decade proving out health IT at CMS and CDC inside set-asides, and has now put that record to work on an unrestricted DoD bench in the same subject matter.
What a Seat Actually Guarantees
Very little, and that is the honest read for anyone sizing this up.
The $300,000,000 is a combined ceiling across all twelve holders, not a number any one of them owns. Each contract carries a $10,000 minimum guarantee, so DHA's total committed obligation across the bench is $120,000.
The ordering period runs a base year and four one-year options, August 2026 through August 2031, and every performance period gets set at the task order.
The seat is the right to compete. The deployment work itself, across the MHS GENESIS, operational medicine and enterprise data portfolios PEO DHMS runs out of Arlington, gets fought over one task order at a time starting now.
Readers who follow the series number will notice HT003826DE014 sits immediately after Vista Global's seat: that is the sole-source bridge to Leidos for MHS GENESIS this desk covered on October 15. DHA has not said how the two relate, and neither will we.
None of which changes what the asterisks are. An unrestricted competition at a $300 million ceiling is exactly the kind of thing a small business is supposed to lose on paper, and two of them are on the list anyway, one of them stepping into its first real field to do it.
Thanks for reading.