U.S. Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) wants the Treasury Department to piggyback onto the larger contract, which is out for bid now, so the government can save money, streamline the number of vendors used and avoid a duplication of efforts.
"[Davis] is always against agencies stovepiping their own solutions when the whole point of IT is to make things smoother, especially interagency" processes, said Robert White, a spokesman for the congressman.
Specifically, Davis wants the Treasury Department to give up on its Treasury Communications Enterprise (TCE) departmentwide contract and join in on the larger-scale Networx package. Networx is the new governmental telecommunications procurement program being set up by the General Services Administration (GSA) to replace the existing FTS2001 telecom contract. Among the federal agencies now using FTS2001 are the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Agriculture and Health and Human Services; NASA; and the Social Security Administration. Those agencies will move to the Networx contract when it is completed.
If the Treasury Department won't give up on its TCE plan, Davis could mount an effort to cut funding for the deal, White said. "That is an option he would pursue," White said. "There's some feeling that Treasury should be a part of Networx."
A spokesman for the Treasury Department declined to comment on the dispute.
The Treasury Department has faced other challenges in pursuing its TCE contract. In December 2004, it awarded a three-year TCE contract to AT&T Corp., with seven one-year options for extending the contract. But the agency cancelled the deal just six months later after other bidders protested and the Government Accountability Office recommended that the AT&T deal be redone.
In September, the Treasury Department again put the TCE contract out for bid after deciding that existing GSA procurement programs wouldn't meet its needs. A month later, the GSA received bids from four major telecommunications companies for the 10-year, $20 billion Networx telecommunications services contract. The four bidders on that contract are MCI Inc., Sprint Nextel Corp., AT&T and Qwest Communications International Inc.
The Networx program is designed to provide legacy and leading-edge voice, data and video services to all U.S. government agencies. Although the Networx program could be worth as much as $20 billion, the government has so far committed to spend only $575 million on the program.
Networx will replace a series of contracts that make up FTS2001 and are set to expire in 2007. MCI and Sprint now hold the main FTS2001 pacts, while Qwest, AT&T, SBC Communications Inc. and others hold what are called crossover contracts that allow them to bid on federal network jobs.
The GSA is expected to award the Networx contract in April and could choose more than one winner.