The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said it plans to not recompete the Enterprise Acquisition Gateway for Leading-Edge Solutions (EAGLE) II contract, and instead pursue a “suite of contract vehicles,” according to a Dec. 17 press release.
The new strategy, EAGLE Next Gen, will use existing government-wide acquisition contracts and create new contract vehicles “with specialized, targeted scope,” DHS said. Among the existing contracts that the department announced that it would use are the General Services Administration’s Alliant 2, Alliant 2 Small Business, 8(a) STARS II, VETS 2, and the National Institutes of Health’s CIO-SP3 and CIO-SP3 Small Business vehicles. DHS plans to add those contracts to its portfolio in early February.
The move represents a change from the previously stated strategy of potentially awarding EAGLE III by the end of the year. At the time, Soraya Correa, chief procurement officer at DHS, stressed that a successor would not come without a thorough look into what other contract vehicles are available, and that she “would not write a contract for the sake of writing a contract.”
In the explanation for the new contract, Correa noted that EAGLE Next Gen “complies with the Office of Management and Budget request under Category Management that agencies do not unnecessarily duplicate contracts that already serve the Government.”
During the transition period, EAGLE II will continue to be used until the contract’s expiration in September 2020.
“We are thinking about the business of IT differently for DHS. Instead of thinking about ‘data centers’ and ‘cloud’, we are thinking about ‘compute and storage’. We are thinking about how IT can better enable Headquarters and the Component to execute the mission. EAGLE Next Gen will take us in this direction,” said Steve Rice, Deputy CIO at DHS.