Palantir invokes its favorite law again — this time against DIA's ASTRA solicitation
Gettyimages.com/Parradee Kietsirikul
By
Nick Wakeman
The company argues a SITE III task order for custom development violates the same FASA mandate that helped it break into the Army's DCGS program.
Palantir is again leaning on a 1994 law that it successfully leverage to crack open the federal market to more commercial solutions.
The company has filed a pre-award protest against a Defense Intelligence Agency solicitation that calls for custom software development. The agency wants to use its SITE III contract to hire a company to develop a software platform for technical research and analysis.
Palantir argues that it has a commercially available solution that can satisfy the requirements of DIA’s Advanced Systems for Technical Research and Analysis, known as ASTRA.
The company says that DIA is violating the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994, which requires agencies to buy commercial solutions when they meet their requirements or to modify their requirements to allow the use of a commercial solution.
The law calls on the government to use commercial solutions to the maximum extent possible.
The 2009 National Defense Authorization Act also mandated the use of commercial software whenever possible.
Requirements of both laws have been incorporated into the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation and the Federal Acquisition Regulation. Deviations that are part of the Revolutionary FAR Overhaul also emphasize the preference for commercial solutions.
Palantir has leaned on these laws in earlier protests including one last year involving DIA’s Prometheus project, which the agency tried to award as a sole-source contract following a Small Business Innovation Research project.
The company argued that DIA didn’t conduct enough market research because if it had, it would have learned that commercial solutions were available.
The protest was dismissed when DIA took corrective action, but it appears no replacement solicitation has been issued.
In 2016, Palantir took the Army to court because it was using custom-software development for the Army’s Distributed Common Ground System. The U.S. Court of Federal Claims agreed with Palantir, and the Army switched its strategy to a commercial solution.
Palantir won the contract, which accelerated the company’s growth in the federal market. The company cracked the Top 100 in 2021 at No. 92 with $262.7 million in prime contracts. Its growth has been steady since, hitting No. 40 this year with over $1 billion in prime contracts.
The company filed its protest on July 20, and the GAO expects to make a ruling by Oct. 28.