On the heels of a Federal judge early March ruling in favor of a handful of contractors who protested not being awarded a piece of the General Service Adminstration’s Alliant contract, the GSA let it be known things wouldn’t be resolved anytime soon.

Rather than open a can of worms by folding the eight protesting contractors into Alliant without addressing other losing bidders, the GSA opted to take a step back and re-evaluate all 62 bids for the 10-year, $50 billion governmentwide acquisition contract. After satisfying the Judge’s ruling in how it evaluates the bidders, GSA will, at some point later this year, award the contract a second time to an undetermined subset of the 62 bidders.

For those who lost out the first time around, a second chance to land the fish that got away. For the initial Alliant winners - uncertainty. After months of work submitting the bid and then building a strategy to execute once announced as a winner, these contractors have to put these plans on hold and enter wait-and-see mode.

While the wait will be excruciating, the GSA knows that rushing the process will not result in an outcome that satisfies any interested party, be they winners, losers, or, most importantly, the judge.

The political theater that is the presidential election season has us well accustomed to the daily barrage of polls and surveys each campaign is trumping. But it is a very different type of survey playing a key role in a massive Government IT contract awarded last year.

This past July, 29 firms were selected from a pool of 66 as eligible contractors for the $50 billion Alliant contract covering a broad range of government IT projects. Winners issued press releases, prepared for Agencies to begin using the contract, and no doubt rejoiced after spending hours, days, weeks preparing their bids.

A month later three unsuccessful bidders protested the General Services Administration (GSA) contract to the GAO. In September that list grew to eight. The winning bidders - names like AT&T, Alion Science and Technology, SAIC, Unisys, EDS, CACI Federal - dug in, waited for the outcome and hoped that the issues could be resolved.

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