In the wake of Oracle’s successful protest of a $950 million “other transaction authority” award by the Army to REAN Cloud, House appropriators are putting the Defense Department on notice that they’ll be keeping a close eye on future OTA awards.
For appropriators, as was the case for the Government Accountability Office, the issue is the use of such awards for procurements that don’t fit the experimental or prototype model that OTAs were intended to handle.
The flexible procurement authority is “an important tool to provide flexibility and agility for cutting-edge research and development projects and prototypes,” lawmakers wrote in a legislative report accompanying the defense funding bill released by the House Appropriations Committee on June 13. “However, the Committee is concerned with the lack of transparency on the use of OTA authority for follow-on production procurements.”
The bill requires that the Secretary of Defense notify House and Senate defense committees 30 days in advance of obligating funds for production contracts under other transaction authority.
Keep reading this article at: https://washingtontechnology.com/articles/2018/06/15/congress-ota.aspx
