Changes to protest rules could shift contracting preferences
Bumping up the Defense Department’s protest threshold could tilt Pentagon buyers away from civilian contracting vehicles.
The 2017 National Defense Authorization Act signed by President Barack Obama on Dec. 23 establishes thresholds for protests of task orders cut against large civilian and military indefinite-delivery contracts, which could push some defense contracts away from civilian agency contracting vehicles, according to a contracting expert.
The NDAA, said Paul Khoury, a partner at Washington, D.C., law firm Wiley Rein, restores the Government Accountability Office's ability to hear protests of task orders against civilian indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contracts over $10 million. The GAO's authority to hear civilian task order protests officially expired at the end of September.
The NDAA also allows GAO to hear protests of task orders against DOD IDIQs over $25 million. The NDAA, Khoury said, bumped up the DOD contracting vehicle protest threshold from $10 million.
Although IDIQ awards between $10 million and $25 million tend to be smaller procurements, Khoury said, the difference could have an impact on how the Defense Department might use civilian IDIQ contracts such at the General Services Administration's IT Schedule 70 IDIQ and other large IDIQs.
If a DOD contract is between $10 and $25 million, according to Khoury, the department could opt to go with the military IDIQ with the higher task order protest threshold. But avoiding protests, he said, is only one factor in a larger pool of considerations in choosing a contracting vehicle.