DISA takes second shot at expanding Leidos' Enclave contract
Gettyimages.com/Dragos Condrea
By
Nick Wakeman
After a protest sank its first attempt, the Defense Information Systems Agency says two dozen companies responded to a market research notice and only Leidos could do the job.
The Defense Information Services Agency taking a second shot at adding the combatant commands' network migration effort to Enclave, the massive IT services contract held by Leidos.
In a revised justification document posted Monday, DISA sought to address many of the complaints that General Dynamics IT raised in its protest of the agency's first attempt in June.
GDIT’s protest led DISA to pull back on the plan to expand Leidos’ contract and kick off a market research effort that was not carried out the out first time around.
Leidos won the potential $11.5 billion Enclave contract in 2022 to migrate the Pentagon’s 22 administrative and support agencies to the DODNet.
DISA first tried to add the combatant commands to the migration effort in June, following a May memo from Pentagon Chief Information Officer Kirsten Davies.
GDIT lodged a protest arguing there were several deficiencies such as inadequate market research, failure to conduct a pricing determination, and a failure to describe steps to remove barriers to future competitions.
GDIT also questioned the urgency DISA used as part of its justification.
In the June justification document, DISA said it waived the need for market research and that Leidos was the only company capable of carrying out the work.
GDIT's protest said that there should be a competition and it could do the work as well. DISA then took corrective action in response to the GDIT protest.
The agency released a sources sought notice in late July and a second posting in late August.
Both notices asked many of the questions that GDIT said were missing the first time around.
With those steps behind it, DISA's newest justification document again seeks to expand Leidos’ Enclave contract to include the combatant commands.
The justification document is an expansion of the original June notice. In fact, it has the same justification and approval number (JA26-059) as the June posting.
The biggest change is the addition of the findings of the market research. DISA received responses from 24 companies including GDIT, Leidos, Booz Allen Hamilton, Accenture, Peraton and Science Applications International Corp.
DISA said Leidos could provide the services at the “scale, magnitude, and speed” the agency said it needs.
Leidos was able to “illustrate an approach that mitigated technical risk associated with conducting both automated endpoint and network migrations and implementing training and adoption measures that support uninterrupted mission operations,” DISA wrote in the document.
DISA also makes a new argument: other vendors would need access to "the migration script author" to adapt DODNet's automation scripts, Active Directory schemas and identity management structures. The agency says earlier attempts to use other vendors for smaller migrations ran into this barrier.
The agency also beefed up its pricing determination, which was missing in the first justification document.
DISA still says the $11.5 billion ceiling will not increase, but it now includes an estimated value for the combatant command work that DISA redacted. Each task order will be priced separately.
The agency also expanded on the urgency it claims justify the need for a speedy migration, including the need to harden national security infrastructure against AI driven threats. DISA is also working to meet certain zero-trust deadlines.
DISA estimates a separate competition would duplicate $15 million in engineering work already done under Enclave and would make an accelerated migration more difficult.
In her May memo, Davies said that the combatant commands should be migrated by the end of the government's fiscal year 2028.
Under the best of circumstances, this will be a massive undertaking. There are 11 combatant commands with 231,000 users at 200 global sites, according to DISA’s July sources sought notice.
So far under Enclave, Leidos has migrated 40,000 users across 900 sites at 14 agencies to DODNet since 2022.
Leidos’ experience is part of DISA’s argument for giving the company the task of migrating the combatant commands. The pace of migrations has accelerated from months to weeks because of the use of automated scripts adapted for DODNet, DISA said.
No response yet from GDIT on whether they will file another protest.