On Wednesday, July 23rd, the Department of the Navy moved forward with two high profile RFPs for Program Management Support Services for the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) and the Next Generation Enterprise Network (NGEN) via the SeaPort-e MAC. One of these contracts INPUT Opportunity Report #49336 (Solicitation #N00024-08-R-3337) is being competed on an "unrestricted" basis, with proposals due by August 26, 2008. The other contract, INPUT Opportunity Report #49343, (Solicitation #N00024-08-R-3339) is being competed as a Small Business Set-Aside with proposals due by August 22, 2008.

The Navy's strategy for competing and awarding the contract for NGEN has been evolving over the last year. DON CIO, Robert Carey, made clear in 2007 that the contract for NGEN will be put into place before the NMCI contract expires in September 2010 in order to provide for as seamless a transition as possible. However, to this Analyst's knowledge, Carey has never mentioned that separate procurements for program management services would be carried out as part of the strategy for putting NGEN in place. The competition of separate contracts for NMCI-NGEN Program Management also was not mentioned in the Naval Networking Enviroment~2016 Strategy Paper that the DON CIO released in May 2008. NMCI and NGEN are pillars of the CIO's NNE strategy.

The appearance of these RFPs is of great value to SeaPort-e vendors who want to compete for NGEN when the Solicitation appears in early FY 2009. My reading of the requirements documents reveals there is no Organizational Conflict of Interest clause in either of the program management solicitations as far as later competing for NGEN is concerned. This makes me wonder if the companies that win these contracts will have an advantage when competing for NGEN. The real concern is that if any advantage exists it would be derived from winning a task order contract that was not publicly competed by the Navy. The entire process strikes me as ethically gray from the standpoint of fairness in Government contracting and contrary to the oft-expressed Congressional demand for greater competition in contracting.

Then again, hiding acquisitions behind the battleship gray of a Multiple Award Contract (MAC) is nothing new for the Navy or the Department of Defense. The contracting environment created by SeaPort-e is effectively an alternate universe. Solicitations in this universe walk a foggy street that hides them from public scrutiny. In this universe, there no protests (until recently for the larger tasks) and industry has no advance warning of the appearance of Solicitations. Sometimes even incumbent contract holders and Contracting Offices utilizing SeaPort-e don't know when their requirements will be solicited. Follow-on contracts tend to disappear behind the SeaPort-e veil and disappear entirely or they re-emerge as new task orders with the name of the requirement altered beyond easy recognition.

Meaning, even SeaPort-e contract holders have difficulty gaining visibility into the limited competition environment of SeaPort-e requirements, but at least they have the opportunity to compete for task orders. Those without a SeaPort-e contract, however, are unable to compete for the increasing number of contracts coming out behind the veil of fog that shrouds the SeaPort-e MAC.