Recompeted
October 4, 20267 min readSubscribers

Who Competed for the $630 Million?

ACC-APG spent Sunday afternoon raising a single-award IDIQ's ceiling from $70 million to $700 million. It is the fifth such notice in six weeks, none of them a justification, and the competition they all rest on was a five-minute video assessed under a solicitation SAM.gov cannot find.

At 1:28 on Sunday afternoon, Army Contracting Command at Aberdeen Proving Ground posted a special notice about a contract most of the market has never heard of.

The notice runs one paragraph. It says ACC-APG "executed a modification" to single-award IDIQ W56KGU-26-D-A001, held by Striveworks Inc. of Austin, raising the ceiling by $630,140,000.00, from $70 million to $700,140,000.

The five-year ordering period, it adds, is unchanged. Then it closes with the sentence that does all the work:

"This announcement satisfies the synopsis requirement for this modification."

That contract is nine months old. Nothing about it was recompeted, nothing went back out to industry, and the only public document is the notice telling you it already happened.

Five Notices in Six Weeks

The Striveworks posting is the fifth of its kind out of the same office, W9128Z, since late August, and four of the five landed in the last 72 hours. Same template every time, down to the closing sentences.

  • Aug 27, Poplicus Incorporated (dba AIR), W9128Z-25-D-A002: +$50M, taking $49M to $99M.
  • Oct 2, 16:13Z, Poplicus again, same contract: +$400M, taking $99M to $499M.
  • Oct 2, 17:10Z, Rune Technologies, W9128Z-26-D-A002: +$250M, taking $99M to $349M.
  • Oct 2, 17:17Z, Onebrief, W9128Z-26-D-A014: +$79M, taking $20M to $99M.
  • Oct 4, 17:28Z, Striveworks, W56KGU-26-D-A001: +$630.14M, taking $70M to $700.14M.

Those four contracts were awarded at a combined $238 million. They now carry $1,647,140,000 of ceiling, which is 6.9 times what the office originally put on paper (chart below).

All four were awarded at $99 million or less, and every one of them has since been multiplied.

Onebrief is the one to sit with. Its award notice went up on September 15, for a contract signed September 11 at a $20 million maximum.

Twenty-one days later the same office quintupled it.

And every one of these notices carries a response date of October 19, two weeks and change after the modifications they describe were already signed.

The window is open. The decision is not.

The rest of this brief is for subscribers.

The specific solicitations, dockets, and dates to act on sit past this line.

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