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Washington, D.C.—The head of the union representing Department of Energy (DOE) employees today filed a protest—her third, made necessary by the agency’s inappropriate and unwise actions—against DOE’s award of a contract to a private firm to perform logistics functions despite that firm’s unrealistically low contract offer.

“The implausibility of the contractor’s bid leads me to believe that it is not realistic,” said President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), who said the bid should have been rejected as not “technically acceptable” and “non-responsive” to the bid solicitation.

Kelley is acting in her capacity as the legal agent of the directly affected DOE logistics employees.

The thrust of this latest protest is that the private company substantially reduced the number of labor hours to perform the logistics function over the period covered by the contract from its previous offer—even though the company was responding to a revised solicitation that increased the performance period from 51 months to 60 months.

“It is not realistic for the private contractor to decrease significantly the number of hours it will provide when the performance period is nine months longer,” Kelley said. “That makes no sense and will inevitably lead to cost overruns that are not being factored into the contractor’s bottom line.”

The agency originally awarded the contract to a private company—Logistics Applications, Inc.—despite that company bidding $2.6 million more than the federal employees already performing the work.

But even after a DOE senior procurement officer upheld Kelley’s protest of the contract award—the first such successful protest under revised Office of Management and Budget (OMB) rules set out in Circular A-76—the agency’s contracting officer refused to award the work to the DOE employees.

Instead, he reopened the competition, changing the source selection method to the “lowest cost, technically-acceptable” option. Kelley’s protest of that move was denied by DOE earlier this month. Again, the contract was awarded to Logistics Applications, Inc.

This long-running public-private competition is being conducted under Circular A-76 for the work of DOE headquarters logistics functions, which includes electricians, maintenance mechanics, engineering technicians and others in Washington, D.C., and Maryland offices. Under federal procurement rules, implementation of the contract is automatically suspended until the protest is resolved.

This protest underscores a fundamental inequity in the system, Kelley said. Following the awarding of the contract, the private company has the right to fully view the employees’ bid, but President Kelley, as the designated representative of the employees, does not have the right to view the offer submitted by the private vendor. “This makes it very difficult,” Kelley said, “to determine how the bid by the private vendor stacks up against the employees’ bid, and if the taxpayers are getting the best deal for their tax dollars.”

More broadly, President Kelley said she is “troubled by the monumental waste of taxpayer dollars that this competition has generated.” Had the employees’ lower bid of more than a year ago been accepted, she said, “the taxpayers would have realized a significant savings and would have been spared the expense of a brand new competition and an additional year of litigation.”

She called this “a prime example of the folly of the administration’s contracting out agenda.”

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 employees in 30 agencies and departments, including some 1,900 at DOE.