Vets contract misses June deadline

The Veterans Technology Services Governmentwide Acquisition Contract will be out in October, said Lurita Doan, administrator of the General Services Administration, on Wednesday. The agency missed its June deadline.

Last week, Doan traveled to the Veterans Affairs conference in Las Vegas to tell the businesses about the missed deadline and to promise that GSA would meet its next one.

When Doan announced the news, “1,100 companies all gasped,” said John Moliere, an advocate for veteran-owned businesses. Moliere is president of Standard Communications, a service-disabled, veteran-owned small business. He attended the conference.

The VETS GWAC is a five-year information technology procurement contract with a $5 billion spending ceiling that is exclusively for small businesses owned by service-disabled veterans. Solicitations came out more than a year ago.

With the missed deadline, the companies missed out on executive agencies' end-of-year spending, he said.

“I know they were anxious and waiting for that, because that is money in their pockets,” Doan said, adding that she would remove any obstacle blocking the October release date.

Nevertheless, the veteran-owned small-business community will continue to support Doan, Moliere said.

“She’s one of us,” he said.

Before taking the top post at GSA in June, Doan founded and was president of New Technology Management Inc., a surveillance technology company.

Moliere believes the GWAC will augment the revenue numbers directed to businesses owned by service-disabled veterans above the 3 percent of contract dollars that congressional directives from 1999 and 2003 mandated agencies set aside for such businesses.

In fiscal 2005, revenues jumped 500 percent, bringing in $600 million last year, up from $120 million in 2004, GSA said in a news release in April. The increase comes as President Bush pushes an initiative aimed at sending more government business toward such firms.