Pentagon | The Contracting Education Academy

June 29, 2020 By cs

Pentagon says it needs ‘more time’ fixing JEDI contract

The JEDI contract will not be awarded until at least August.

In updated legal filings, the Defense Department said it will not be in a position to award its Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract to either Microsoft or Amazon Web Services until at least August 17.

The June 16 filing comes more than six months after AWS first challenged the Pentagon’s October award of the $10 billion contract to Microsoft in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, which resulted in the Pentagon pulling the contract to take corrective action on identified flaws.

According to the filing, both companies submitted revised JEDI proposals in May, but they’ll have to revise and submit bids once more because the Pentagon intends to issue another amendment to the JEDI solicitation by June 22.

“DoD continues to evaluate the offerors’ revised proposals, and more time is required to complete this process,” attorneys for the Defense Department said in the filing. “DoD now anticipates that another solicitation amendment will be necessary, and additional limited proposal revisions will be permitted.”

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2020/06/pentagon-says-it-needs-more-time-fixing-jedi-contract/166292/

June 25, 2020 By cs

Pentagon IG offers advice for effective contracting during pandemic

With billions of dollars in CARES Act funding yet to be spent and several billion more potentially in the appropriations pipeline, it’s far too early to tell how effectively the Defense Department is spending its share of the disaster funding.

**Click on image above to download the report.**

But according to the Pentagon’s inspector general, DoD — and its auditors — have more than enough experience with prior emergencies to know what to do, and what not to do, to make sure money is spent well even when contracts have to be executed quickly.

In a new special report, drawing on 36 earlier audits that dealt with contracting during previous emergencies, the OIG tries to outline what it considers best practices for contracting under time pressure.

“It is a very fast paced, ever changing environment right now with this pandemic. But what contracting officers are experiencing right now is similar to pressures that were present during past disaster response and relief efforts. So our intent here was to highlight best practices and lessons learned that really span a significant portion of time,” Theresa Hull, the assistant inspector general for audit acquisition, contracting, and sustainment said in an interview for Federal News Network’s On DoD. “Our reports go back to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 but also include the more recent hurricanes, Florence and Irma, and we highlighted four areas that the contracting community should be aware of: Communication and coordination; documentation, consistency in the contracting process, and staffing and training.”

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/on-dod/2020/06/pentagon-ig-offers-advice-for-effective-contracting-during-pandemic/

The Contracting Education Academy at Georgia Tech has established a webpage where all contract-related developments related to the coronavirus (COVID-19) are summarized. Find the page at: https://contractingacademy.gatech.edu/coronavirus-information-for-contracting-officers-and-contractors/

June 24, 2020 By cs

Pentagon starts bailing out companies that have lost business due to coronavirus

The Pentagon has begun to bail out U.S. companies that have seen large parts of their business dry up amid the coronavirus pandemic, in a bid to make sure they can still build weapons.

Officials have announced that five mid-tier defense companies had received a total of $135 million to “help sustain defense-critical workforce capabilities in body armor, aircraft manufacturing, and shipbuilding,” according to a Defense Department statement. “These actions will help to retain critical workforce capabilities throughout the disruption caused by COVID-19 and to restore some jobs lost because of the pandemic,” Lt. Col. Mike Andrews, a Defense Department spokesman, said in the statement.

Meanwhile, a senior Pentagon official told lawmakers that DoD plans to ask Congress for money to reimburse many of its contractors for COVID-related expenditures; for example, wages paid to keep employees on the payroll despite idled production lines and vacated offices; purchases of personal protective gear, and alterations to factory and other work spaces for social distancing.

These moves will buttress earlier Pentagon efforts to shore up its COVID-rattled contractors, including paying firms more money up front and awarding multibillion-dollar contracts earlier than planned.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.defenseone.com/business/2020/06/pentagon-starts-bailing-out-companies-have-lost-business-due-coronavirus/166106/

June 17, 2020 By cs

Pentagon says it needs billions to repay contractors for employee leave

The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act gave the Defense Department the authority to reimburse federal contractors who faced sudden expenses because of COVID-19.

But the bill didn’t include any new funding to make those payments, and DoD officials are telling Congress they need billions of additional dollars to make contractors whole.

One section of the law — Section 3610 — lets agencies repay contractors who put their employees on paid leave rather than furloughing or laying them off. The idea was to keep as much of the industrial base workforce as possible in a ready state.

But those reimbursements are “subject to the availability of appropriations,” which aren’t expected to come through until Congress passes the next round of coronavirus relief. DoD officials have submitted a rough cost estimate to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

But in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), Ellen Lord, the undersecretary of Defense for acquisition and sustainment, declined to provide an exact figure, saying only that it’s likely to be in the double-digit billion dollar range. In any event, the bill is expected to be so large that DoD can’t pay it out of its existing budget without affecting other programs, she said.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-main/2020/06/pentagon-says-it-needs-billions-to-repay-contractors-for-employee-leave/

May 28, 2020 By cs

What Google’s new contract reveals about the Pentagon’s evolving clouds

For one thing, it disproves fears that the massive JEDI contract meant one company would get all the work.

Tools and a console built with Google’s Anthos application management platform will allow the Defense Innovation Unit to manage apps on either of the cloud services heavily used by the Pentagon.

Google will build security-and app-management tools for the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), deepening the Silicon Valley giant’s military ties and illuminating the challenges facing the Defense Department’s drive to a multi-cloud environment.

Tools and a console built with the company’s Anthos application management platform will allow DIU to manage apps on either of the cloud services heavily used by the Pentagon: Microsoft Azure, which won the hotly contested JEDI cloud contract, and Amazon Web Services, or AWS, heavily used by DoD researchers, from a Google Cloud console.

Mike Daniels, vice president of government sales for Google Cloud services, said the company’s approach to security both complements and differs from those of Microsoft and AWS. Traditional “castle-and-moat” network security uses firewalls and virtual private networks to keep attackers on the other side of some sort of digital barrier. The higher security certification, the deeper and wider that moat. It works well enough in a single-cloud environment but less well in one with applications running in multiple clouds. It can also present problems when you’re dealing with an “extended workforce”: a bunch of people working from home or different locations.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2020/05/what-googles-new-contract-reveals-about-pentagons-evolving-clouds/165524/

The JEDI contract will not be awarded until at least August.

With billions of dollars in CARES Act funding yet to be spent and several billion more potentially in the appropriations pipeline, it’s far too early to tell how effectively the Defense Department is spending its share of the disaster funding.

The Pentagon has begun to bail out U.S. companies that have seen large parts of their business dry up amid the coronavirus pandemic, in a bid to make sure they can still build weapons.

The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act gave the Defense Department the authority to reimburse federal contractors who faced sudden expenses because of COVID-19.

For one thing, it disproves fears that the massive JEDI contract meant one company would get all the work.

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