GAO gives Battelle narrow reopening to win $8B Antarctica contract
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By
Nick Wakeman
The Government Accountability Office rejected most of the challenges in Battelle's protest, but found the National Science Foundation improperly credited KBR with an affiliate's past performance record.
Battelle Memorial Institute has won a second shot at the $8 billion Antarctica research support contract, but the nonprofit firm's path to success is still very narrow.
In September, Battelle challenged the National Science Foundation’s decision to award the 20-year contract to KBR.
Among several allegations, Battelle claimed NSF failed to fully consider KBR’s impending spinoff of the business that won the contract.
Pointing to the contemporaneous record, Battelle said there was no evidence that NSF considered the spinoff that will create a new company launching in January that will be called Trinzic.
But NSF countered that the spinoff had “no material impact on KBR’s proposal because all the relevant corporate assets would transfer from KBR to the new entity,” according to the GAO decision unsealed Tuesday.
GAO denied that part of Battelle’s protest.
Other parts of Battelle’s protest that GAO denied involved cost realism of labor rates, key personnel, and the evaluation of KBR’s management approach.
But the one area where Battelle prevailed was how NSF scored KBR’s experience and the past performance of an affiliated company. The affiliate is unnamed in the protest decision.
KBR provided five examples of past experiences and two of the examples were performed by the affiliated company, and three by KBR. GAO said that NSF was wrong to include the affiliate’s experience in KBR’s prior score, which was rated “High Confidence.”
KBR's proposal never spelled out what personnel, systems or resources the affiliate would actually contribute to the contract. KBR said they used a “one-team” approach but GAO said that vague language was not enough.
However, that finding was enough for GAO to tell NSF it needs to reevaluate the prior experience and past performance factors of its decision. NSF should then conduct a new trade-off decision.
While the decision is good news for Battelle, the path to wrestling the win away from KBR appears narrow when considering that all the other scores are nearly identical.
KBR holds a commanding price edge, as its evaluated price for the two sample task orders is 39% lower than Battelle's. That gap gives Battelle just a narrow opening for the second time around.