In DC the fix is usually in. Someone knows someone who knows someone and millions, if not billions, of dollars of taxpayer-funded contracts are awarded this way. An example of that is a tale we’ve been following for a while: the story of data firm Trowbridge and Trowbridge (T & T) and their never-ceasing effort to crony their way into government cash. This time, they’ve walked over a firm run by disabled veterans to do it.

Over the past several months, the Department of Labor (DOL) has put out two separate Request for Proposals (RFP) to small private sector business data centers for competition. The former contractor, Trowbridge and Trowbridge, used to be a small business, but is now a large concern thanks to this contract from DOL.

Trowbridge ran two consecutive previous small business contracts for DOL Job Corps Data Centers. Both were eventually canceled, as DOL was told by their own legal department it could not keep language in the contract that unfairly slants the contracts toward Trowbridge. You see, T & T has worked their connections with the feds like milking a cow. Now, the federal government is on its third procurement and they have decided to flim-flam the small business community with a game of musical chairs. They have done this by trying to rope large firms like Raytheon and Lockheed in with smaller firms, like those run by disabled vets, so the little guys, in a David v. Goliath scenario, would be shut out. (We’ve withheld the name of the disabled vet firm at their own request.)

Of course, the small firms protested, but to no avail. Meanwhile, the big firms were only given three weeks to respond to the RFP. As leviathans, they do not exactly turn on a dime. This leaves the little guys out, the really big guys disinterested, and who is left? You guessed it: our pals at Trowbridge.

DOL says that it posted the same solicitation now under two government-wide acquisition contract schedules—one unrestricted and one for small businesses. This was supposedly done simply in order to give as many firms as possible a chance to participate. According to DOL, the solicitation posted in those two is “exactly the same.” Specifically, they said that they posted the solicitation under both the DOL large business schedule and small business schedule in order to maximize the number of small businesses that could participate in the competition. Yeah, right.

But it’s an obvious contradiction, as they had to have known the big fish would eat the little fish. The unrestricted part of the procurement, open to all, contains 52 large contract holders, including only two small businesses. Large bidders include Accenture Federal Services, Booz-Hamilton, Deloitte, and General Dynamics. How’s that for a murderer’s row? How could little guys compete? But remember about the three weeks. Ergo, hello Trowbridge!

One of the small businesses, the small disabled veteran owned company in question, responded this way: “DOL communicated its decision ambiguously in the solicitation and by that made it seem that the procurement was restricted to small businesses. DOL had ample opportunity to unambiguously communicate its desire to allow large businesses to compete for this work under an unrestricted basis. They chose not to do so.” So a government contract is specifying details that go out of its way to harm small business so one of their cronies, Trowbridge, can cash in.

For a small business like a disabled veteran firm, the involvement of a large firm is usually an immediate “block” in its path, resulting in a no-bid decision, especially when the incumbent, as here, is large—Deloitte, for example. Finally, DOL also failed to address the last argument that the disabled veteran firm made in its protest, the crux of it being that the contracting officer violated the Federal Acquisition Regulation law provisions that contain very specific responsibilities for contracting officers that requires contractors to receive impartial, fair and equitable treatment.

Those are the twisted rules in the big game of high stakes government contracting. Seems like some undecipherable gibberish? It is. But it is gibberish that costs taxpayers millions every year and lets DOL cronies take advantage of legitimate firms. Think no one cares about such boring, wonky, inside baseball stuff? They don’t. But that apathy lets firms like Trowbridge scam the feds and collect your tax dollars like ripe apples falling from a tree. So maybe, just maybe, we should care after all.

This piece was written by PoliZette Staff on June 11, 2020. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

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