The Six-Year Lease Behind a Three-Month Bridge
DHA extended its Enterprise Software Services incumbent by three months on October 26, and the reason it gave is a building lease the incumbent renewed for six years and will not sublease. Inside: a twelve-month bridge now in its nineteenth month, and the six words NGA quietly changed to move the FS3i competition two quarters to the right.
If you have ever drafted the reason-not-competed section of a justification, you know the stock version.
The incumbent holds the accreditation, the clearances, the integration, the institutional memory. Nobody else can stand that up by the date.
On Monday the Defense Health Agency filed one that turns on a commercial real estate lease.
1,175 DoD notices hit SAM.gov between Saturday morning and this morning. Three of them use the word bridge, and one of those is about railroad vegetation. The other two are the story.
The lease is the reason
PEO Defense Healthcare Management Systems posted an award notice at 18:31Z Monday for the Enterprise Software Services bridge. The award block carries modification P00002 to HT003826CE005, signed October 26, $8,658,101.08, to American Systems Corporation. It extends operational CLINs 0001 through 0005 by three months and shifts the transition-out CLINs "pending completion of the follow-on competitive procurement HT003826CS003."
Then the agency explains why nobody else could do it:
"The accredited environment sits in space the incumbent holds under lease. That lease has been renewed for a six-year term cannot be assigned, and the incumbent does not intend to sublease."
The missing comma is DHA's. So is the logic.
The barrier to competing this work is square footage, held on a six-year term by the firm whose contract is being extended three months at a time.
The notice adds that standing up and accrediting a replacement facility "takes substantially longer than the bridge period," which is true of every bridge period DHA has written so far.
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