Treasury awards AT&T $270 million Networx task order

In a replay of almost three years ago, the Treasury Department has awarded AT&T a contract valued at up to $270 million for network services under the General Services Administration’s Networx Universal contract. Treasury originally awarded AT&T a $1 billion, 10-year contract in December 2004 under the Treasury Communications Enterprise, now called TNet. Treasury is the second department to award a task order under the $48 billion Networx contracting vehicle. The Homeland Security Department issued a task order in June for its OneNet intranet for sensitive but unclassified information to three vendors, which will compete to be DHS’ primary and secondary service providers. Last December, under pressure from GSA, the Office of Management and Budget, and Congress, Treasury agreed to participate in the governmentwide Networx program to integrate its telecommunications requirements into a single Treasury network infrastructure. Under the Networx program, Treasury will use a fully managed network service, supported by service-level agreements and performance incentives to provide secure voice, data and video communications. Before moving to the Networx fold, Treasury had been recompeting its TCE contract as the result of an award protest that the Government Accountability Office upheld in 2005. Treasury did not inform bidders of a separate agreement that would affect the contract, GAO said then. Unknown to the bidders at the time, Treasury had signed an agreement with GSA and OMB to pave the way for a move to Networx when TCE’s base period expired. Under the deal to drop TCE and move to Networx, GSA agreed to share in costs due the bidders at the time, reduce by half Treasury’s Networx service fees and give Treasury the ability to place orders under Networx shortly after the contract was awarded. Treasury said it was pleased with GSA's responsiveness in letting the department rapidly award this task order under Networx, said Michael Duffy, Treasury’s new chief information officer. "We got a top-quality technical solution at prices that exceeded our expectations,” he said in a statement issued today. "Treasury is the first agency to have completed a fair opportunity decision on the Networx Universal contract and we expect they will be the first agency to begin ordering service," said Karl Krumbholz, director of GSA’s Network Services Programs.