Defense

Perspecta fails again in protest of Navy’s $7.7B NGEN-R

The U.S. Court of Federal Claims entered a judgment Thursday ruling in favor of the Navy's original award of the contract to Leidos in February

By Billy Mitchell

December 18, 2020

A Navy systems technician looks over the Port of Los Angeles at the approach of USS America. (U.S. Navy / MC1 Christopher Okula)

A federal claims court Thursday denied Perspecta‘s latest protest of the Navy’s $7.7 billion contract for the network services portion of the Next Generation Enterprise Networks Recompete (NGEN-R).

The U.S. Court of Federal Claims entered a judgment ruling in favor of the Navy’s original award of the contract to Leidos in February. The court hasn’t yet published an opinion supporting its decision.

The Government Accountability Office also denied an earlier Perspecta protest of the award. Similarly, General Dynamics IT protested the award with GAO and lost.

Under this Service Management, Integration and Transport (SMIT) $7.7 billion contract — one of two main elements of the overall NGEN-R — the Navy is acquiring “base network services … such as electronic software delivery, end user core build, endpoint detection, logistics management, network operations, security operations, service desk, transport and virtualization services.”

In its protest complaint, Perspecta argued that the Navy’s award to Leidos was “riddled with material and prejudicial errors,” including not considering conflicts of interest, improperly evaluated pricing scenarios and “engaged in inadequate and misleading discussions that it disingenuously represented were comprehensive.”

These arguments were similar to those it pushed with the GAO. The GAO, however, found that “the Navy’s evaluation was reasonable and that, to the extent that there were errors in the agency’s evaluation, those errors did not result in competitive prejudice to Perspecta because its proposal remains higher-priced and lower-rated than Leidos’s proposal.”

If Perspecta were to continue protesting the award, its next stop would be with a federal appeals court.

Leidos, on the other hand, celebrated the decision.“We’re pleased the Court of Federal Claims ruled in our favor,” said Gerry Fasano, Leidos Defense Group president. “During this partial stay, and the previous protests which were also dismissed, Leidos has not been sitting still. We are ready for immediate program execution and success.”

The other portion of the NGEN-R acquisition, for end-user hardware, was won by HPI Federal LLC — HP’s arm to sell equipment and software to the federal government — in October 2019.