NASA's big contract vehicle lowers fee

Customers of NASA's Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement contract will see a lower use fee to use the SEWP vehicle this fiscal year.

SEWP Program Management Office reduced the Government Wide Acquisition Contract's usage fee from .375% to .36% on Oct. 7.

The markdown, according to Woytek, is a result of a good year for the GWAC that saw 35,000 new orders from federal agencies in the last fiscal year that brought in almost $6.7 billion for fiscal 2019 when combined with modifications for previous orders.

"It's simply a budgeting issue," Woytek said. SEWP can't keep money beyond its annual operating expenses, she told FCW. Excess money has to be given to the Treasury Department, she said. While other federal GWACs give customers discounts, SEWP can't provide individual discounts to customers, Woytek said.

The fee reduction is an effort to address both those issues by giving the GWAC's widening customer base some return on using the contract, she said: "Every six months, we do a review and every two or three years, we lower the fee."

SEWP has been working to improve its internal operating systems as well, she said. It's putting the final touches on its "high-availability system" that has more robust failover capabilities.

The GWAC has been working on the system this fiscal year. A power failure last February that knocked it offline for a couple of days came as it was testing those capabilities.