DHS cancels pair of massive IT, professional services vehicles

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As the Homeland Security Department sees things, neither FirstSource III nor PACTS III fit into how the Trump administration wants civilian contracting to be done.

The Homeland Security Department will not proceed with its work to finalize awards for a pair of IT and professional services contracts that had roughly $18.4 billion in combined ceiling value over the next decade.

All because the landscape for civilian contracting is changing in the Trump administration, which wants substantially all of that activity to go through and be led by the General Services Administration.

With that changing environment in mind, DHS announced Friday it is cancelling the solicitations for its FirstSource III commodity IT and PACTS III professional services contract vehicles that were reserved for small businesses.

DHS made one round of awards and was working toward a second for the potential $10 billion FirstSource III vehicle, which later became the subject of a multi-company protest at the Court of Federal Claims.

The department also never got to the finish line in awarding the potential $8.4 billion Program Management, Administrative, Clerical, and Technical Services III contract. Proposals for this vehicle were due in May 2024.

PACTS III was also the subject of several pre-award protests and several announcements from DHS about how it was continuing to evaluate proposals, the most recent update of which came in December.

But the FirstSource III court proceedings are the most detailed window of how DHS sees where it stands in the overall acquisition and procurement environment, which centers around the administration’s push to centralize how civilian agencies buy “common goods and services” such as IT.

President Trump’s March 20 executive order uses that phrase to explain how the administration is working to make GSA the central authority and customer for those items.

In late May, DHS received the pause in all FirstSource III court proceedings that it asked for in order to have time to consider what that order means for its contract portfolio.

Part of DHS’ update to the court included how it was required to submit a plan for how GSA would take over the bulk of the department’s domestic procurement responsibilities. Other federal agencies and departments have been operating under the same requirement.

As far as what will replace PACTS III, DHS says it will instead rely on GSA’s OASIS+ professional services vehicle and Multiple Award Schedule contracts to fulfill those requirements.

DHS also said offerings that would have gone through FirstSource III are already available through other GSA contracts and NASA’s SEWP vehicle, which is also for commodity IT buys and largely geared toward value-added resellers.

GSA is working with NASA on a plan to take over the management and operation of SEWP.