NASA could take months to respond to $2.5B IT contract protest — Leidos CEO

NASA might not award its $2.5 billion, next-generation enterprise IT contract again for months following a bid protest Science Applications International Corp., said Leidos CEO Roger Krone, on the company’s earnings call Tuesday.

The agency is taking corrective action over the 10-year Advanced Enterprise Global IT Solutions (AEGIS) contract, which could take until the third or fourth quarter of 2021, Krone said.

SAIC held the NASA Integrated Communications Services (NICS) contract, AEGIS’s predecessor, prior to its split with Leidos and protested its now competitor’s win with the Government Accountability Office on July 6. The new contract adds zero-trust security, data center and cloud computing services and is integral to NASA’s Artemis program aiming to send astronauts to Mars, but now it’s in limbo.

“History has told us NASA takes corrective action, they make another award decision and then, of course, usually that is followed by another protest, and those tend to last kind of 100 days,” Krone said. “And so it may take them another three, four weeks to do their corrective action, and then you tack another three months on the back of that.”

NASA did not respond to a request for comment on the corrective action it’s taking by publication time.

The agency plans to use the contract to move to modern identity and access management through network automation. AEGIS also covers wide area networking, center local area networking, telecommunications, online collaboration tools, cable plant, emergency and early warning notification systems, telephony, and radio systems.