On October 13, the Army reopened its $50 billion Marketplace for Acquisition of Professional Services contract, known as MAPS, to small businesses that want to bid as a team. It did it with Amendment 0011, posted on SAM.gov. Proposals are now due Monday, November 30.
The reopening followed GAO's August 11 decision. GAO found the Army could not bar small business teams from a contract that rolls this much existing work into one. Since the reopening, three companies have filed new protests against the solicitation with GAO, which has until February to rule on them.
What the Army changed
MAPS combines two existing Army contracts, RS3 and ITES-3S, into one multiple award contract for IT and professional services. It covers five areas of work, which the Army calls domains: engineering, logistics and operational services; management and advisory; research and development; emerging IT; and foundational IT. The solicitation calls for 70 awards in each domain: 30 for large businesses, 25 for small businesses and 15 for what it calls commercial-sector vendors.
Amendment 0011 lets small businesses bid as a "Small Business Teaming Arrangement (SBTA)." The solicitation counts teams among the 25 small business awards in each domain.
The window it opened is narrow. Only teams can submit under the amendment. No one else may "propose or modify their prior submissions," the Army wrote, and that includes small businesses bidding on their own. Large businesses, commercial-sector vendors and solo small business bidders keep the proposals they already turned in.
A small business that already bid on its own does get a choice. It can withdraw its proposal for one domain and resubmit for that domain as a team, and its proposals for the other domains stay in place. The Army spelled this out on October 16. Its example was a company that bid all five domains and now wants to bid one of them as a team.
Proposals were first due November 12. On November 6, the Army moved the date to 11:59 a.m. Eastern on November 30. In an update on its SAM.gov notice, it said the move was "in preparation for the release of Amendment 0012" and wrote, "We encourage offerors to not submit proposals until they review Amendment 0012." As of November 9, that amendment had not been posted.
Three new protests
Three protests against the MAPS solicitation are open at GAO, according to GAO's dockets.
| Protester | Filed | GAO decision due |
|---|---|---|
| Intelligence Consulting Enterprise Solutions | October 29 | February 8 |
| AHS Business Services | November 2 | February 10 |
| MindBoard | November 3 | February 11 |
GAO doesn't release protest documents while a protest is pending, so what each company is arguing isn't public. One of the three, Intelligence Consulting Enterprise Solutions, is the same company that won the August decision.
Why awards could slip past February
Federal law puts the contract on hold while a protest is open. Under 31 U.S.C. 3553, a contract "may not be awarded" once the agency is notified of a protest "and while the protest is pending." There is one way around it. A senior Army official can approve an award in writing if "urgent and compelling circumstances" won't allow the wait.
GAO gets 100 days to decide a protest under 31 U.S.C. 3554. Counted from each filing date, those 100 days run out in early February.
A protest can end sooner. When an agency fixes the problem a protester raised, the protest usually goes away, and nobody outside the Army knows yet what Amendment 0012 will change. But unless these protests end early, the Army can't make awards before GAO rules, and a win for the protesters could mean another round of proposals.
What a team can and can't do
The FAR defines a small business teaming arrangement two ways. It can be a joint venture of two or more small businesses. Or it can be a small business prime with other small businesses as its subcontractors on a specific contract. For the second kind, the agreement has to be in writing. It must be "specifically referred to as a 'Small Business Teaming Arrangement.'" And it must set out each company's "responsibilities, roles, and percentages (or other allocations) of work."
The Army made that concrete. Amendment 0011 added a team agreement form and a utilization matrix to the solicitation. On the form, the prime and its subcontractor check off which work each will cover in each domain. They also agree the form is "a binding commitment of each Party." If the prime wins, the agreement becomes part of the contract. Either side can walk away later with 30 days' written notice, but the prime has to follow the contract's process to do it.
The payoff is past performance. Under 13 CFR 125.2(g), a small business prime can name its small business subcontractors in the proposal. If the prime's own record isn't enough, the agency must count the team's capabilities and past performance as the prime's. A capable company with a short contract history can compete on its teammates' record.
The limits matter just as much:
- Every member of the team has to qualify as small under the NAICS code for the domain it's bidding. Each also needs an active SAM registration and a Unique Entity ID when the proposal goes in.
- Teams compete for the small business awards. The solicitation counts them among the 25 small business awards in each domain.
- Each company can be on only one proposal per domain, counting its parents, subsidiaries and affiliates, whether it's the prime or a teammate. If a company "appears on multiple proposals within the same Domain," every proposal involving it will be "rejected, and eliminated from further evaluation and consideration for award."
That last rule is where teams get hurt. A company that already bid a domain on its own, or that agreed to join someone else's team for it, can sink every proposal it touches. Check where each partner has already bid before anyone signs.
Who should move now
The reopening is aimed at small IT and professional services firms that couldn't clear the experience bar alone. Some sat out MAPS. Others bid on their own anyway.
For a small business that already bid alone, the decision before November 30 is whether any one domain would score better as a team. That call is made one domain at a time. For everyone else interested, three dates matter: whenever the Army posts Amendment 0012, November 30 for proposals, and February 8 through 11 for GAO's decisions.
If you're trying to put a MAPS team together and you're stuck on the agreement, the work split or which domain to bid, talk to a FEDCON advisor. We'll help you sort it out, so your time goes into the proposal, not the paperwork.