The Cancellation Heard ‘Round the Beltway: A2SB
The General Services Administration (GSA) sent a shot around the Government Contracting universe just a few short weeks ago. After a five-plus year procurement timeline, 493 bids submitted, and over 15 protests — GSA canceled the highly anticipated Alliant 2 Small Business (A2SB) Governmentwide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) and pissed all of us off.
Following the cancelation of A2SB, GSA’s Assistant Commissioner for the Office of Information Technology Category, Laura Stanton, released a blog post mentioning that they plan on conducting a wholesale reevaluation of their socio-economic vehicles. As with any large vehicle news, industry conducted its post-mortem — but a lot of the conversation focused on what GSA did wrong and where the agency should go from here…sans any real input on what is realistic for actual Government Contractors.
This type of earth-shattering cancellation is not uncommon in our industry, and not just for GSA. However, this particular cancellation is timely as it is littered with complexities that will have major consequences for small-and mid-tier Government Contractors hoping to keep their organizations competitive over the next year. Long-lasting, impactful initiatives are at play here ranging from Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) to Category Management/Best-In-Class (BIC) contracts to GSA eBuy Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) consolidations.
To be frank, GSA has dropped small-and mid-tier Government contractors out into the middle of the ocean without a life raft and the water is turbulent.
The A2SB cancellation has made The Pulse of GovCon mad as hell. We want to make sure the industry understands why this is detrimental to our ecosystem. To help us speak to this more eloquently, The Pulse reached out to Courtney Fairchild, President, and CEO of Global Services, to discuss the impacts and realities of the A2SB cancellation.
Read our thoughts here: https://thepulsegovcon.com/article/the-cancellation-heard-round-the-beltway-a2sb/
