Treasury announces new telecom solicitation

The Treasury Department amended its solicitation for its telecommunications contract Thursday, taking it one step further away from sharing the General Services Administration's contract for telecommunications services.

The amendment dealt another setback to efforts by Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., and senior GSA officials to shift Treasury's telecommunications work to GSA, which is in the middle of running the largest telecommunications contract in government history, known as Networx. Treasury's contract -- the Treasury Communications Enterprise -- was awarded to AT&T Corp. last year, but then was revoked after five losing bidders filed a successful protest.

The protest partly was driven by a now-defunct memorandum of understanding signed in December 2004 by Ira Hobbs, chief information officer at Treasury; Sandra Bates, former commissioner of GSA's Federal Technology Service; David Safavian, the former head of the Office of Management and Budget's Office of Federal Procurement Policy; and Karen Evans, administrator of OMB's office of electronic government.

The agreement specified that GSA and Treasury would work together to evaluate whether Treasury should continue with its own telecom procurement or join GSA's Networx. According to the memorandum, OMB would adjudicate any disagreements.

Davis had strongly encouraged Treasury to use Networx in lieu of its own program. Government Executive reported earlier this year that Davis played a role in the agreement between Treasury and GSA.

Thursday's amendment to Treasury's solicitation "represents the department's stubborn effort to continue ahead with the TCE program," said Drew Crockett, a spokesman for Davis. "Chairman Davis does not support agencies erecting stovepipe infrastructures that too often are not interoperable."

Procurements such as TCE "foster the perpetuation or creation of duplicative administrative procurement functions across government that are far more costly and far less efficient than centrally managed core infrastructure procurements," Crockett said.

When Treasury announced in August that it would reopen its contract, both GSA and Davis expressed disappointment. At the time, Barbara Shelton, acting commissioner of GSA's newly created Federal Acquisition Service, said she would welcome Treasury with "open arms" should the agency change its mind and join Networx. On Friday, a GSA spokeswoman directed comments on the most recent announcement to Treasury.

Calls to Treasury were not returned Friday. In August, spokeswoman Brookly McLaughlin said Treasury had determined that GSA was unable to meet its telecommunication needs.

According to a person familiar with the issue, the memorandum between GSA and Treasury is no longer in effect.

Only the original bidders on the Treasury contract are allowed to compete for the revised solicitation. Those bidders are Northrop Grumman Information Technology Inc., Broadwing Communications LLC, Level 3 Communications Inc., Qwest Government Services Inc., MCI WorldCom Communications Inc., Sprint and AT&T.

Jim McGann, a spokesman for AT&T Government Solutions, said Friday, "As we've said in the past, we're very interested in this, and we're going to pursue it. We feel like we offered a good proposal last time, and we'll vigorously pursue this business."

A spokeswoman for MCI said the company has assembled its team in preparation to compete, and is waiting on final information from Treasury.

Thursday's amendment makes many changes to the original solicitation, including pricing evaluations and past performance ratings.

Anthony D'Agata, manager of Sprint's government systems division, said one effect of the amendment will be to clarify the solicitation's requirements, which were interpreted differently by bidders last time.

D'Agata said that Thursday's announcement confirmed for him that Treasury will move forward and procure telecommunications services on its own. "We were all wondering whether Treasury would choose to come out with the solicitation again or just procure services over another contract vehicle like [GSA's] FTS 2001 or wait for Networx," he said, adding that the amendment solidifies Treasury's decision to run its own competition.

The bidders are required to sign and return the document to Treasury by 2 p.m. on Nov. 17. They have until Oct. 27 to ask questions related to the amendment.