Legislator asks OMB to make Treasury drop telecom contract

A House lawmaker last week restated his opposition to a Treasury Department solicitation for a billion-dollar telecommunications contract, expected to be awarded soon, that would compete with an upcoming General Services Administration contract.

In a May 25 letter to Karen Evans, the Office of Management and Budget's administrator of e-government and information technology, Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., encouraged the Office of Electronic Government to intercede in Treasury's plans for the Treasury Communications Enterprise acquisition, and redouble its support for GSA's pending Networx contract.

"For nearly two years, I have been unwavering in my position on TCE: notably, that this acquisition runs contrary to a vision that I and many in Congress share -- that our government needs an efficient, well-managed communications environment," wrote Davis, chairman of the House Government Reform Committee.

He did not specify what intervention he hoped Evans would make, nor did he clarify how the agency might enhance its support for the Networx contract.

GSA's procurement, which consists of two linked acquisitions for large and small businesses, has a minimum revenue guarantee of $525 million over five years but is expected to total around $20 billion over 10 years. The solicitation is in the proposal review stage following the submission of industry bids in October 2005. Awards are anticipated in the spring of 2007.

Treasury's communications contract has had a rocky, two-year history: A $1 billion award was announced to AT&T in 2005, but was successfully protested through the Government Accountability Office, with the entire solicitation apparently dropped at that point. But it was later resurrected, with industry bids due last December. Brookly McLaughlin, a Treasury spokeswoman, said the department is finalizing its bid assessments and expects to announce the results shortly.

A February report by the Treasury inspector general's office said the department had not completed an effective cost-benefit analysis before deciding to reject the GSA contract in favor of its own, and recommended that the department consider canceling the solicitation. OMB and GSA have urged Treasury to drop its plans in favor of the centralized, governmentwide Networx contract, but the department insists that GSA's contract will not be ready in time to meet its needs, among other arguments.

Davis has long sided with GSA, and threatened to enlist the help of legislators who serve on the Appropriations Committee to zero out funding for the Treasury contract. Rob White, a Davis spokesman, said a push to advance the issue through OMB does not necessarily mean a retreat from the legislative approach, though he did not know whether negotiations for Treasury's fiscal 2007 funding were addressing the issue.

"I was assured that TCE would stand as a model acquisition," Davis wrote in last week's letter. "As I suspected, the opposite was true."