Jane Edwards
The Department of Homeland Security intends to award the third iteration of the FirstSource small business contract for software and information technology products in 2023 and Paul Courtney, chief procurement officer at DHS, cited the agency’s plan to conduct on-ramps for the FirstSource III contract, Federal News Network reported Monday.
“If we put together a five, six, seven year contract, industry is going to change. There’ll be new vendors in the marketplace, who we want to have. So that’s something we are looking at and we are putting in place with our bigger vehicles,” Courtney told FNN in an interview.
“But with that, on the flip side, we’re also going to have off ramping so if we have a vehicle with 50 companies and only five or 10 are really going for every opportunity, and a majority of them, another 30-40 companies that aren’t, we’ll have this conversation with those companies, whether it makes sense for them to stay on the vehicle,” he added.
FirstSource III is a potential $10 billion multiple-award contract. DHS released the solicitation for the vehicle in April 2021 and made 15 amendments over the last two years.
Courtney discussed the challenge posed by the large volume of proposals that need to be reviewed and the changes it made to FirstSource III to address the administrative burden cited by vendors in the second iteration of the vehicle.
“Our whole team is ready to award this and move forward and just want to make sure we do it right and make sure we have a great pool of vendors at the end of the day supporting our FirstSource III contracts,” Courtney noted.
