Customs and Border Protection begins process for IT acquisition

U.S. Customs and Border Protection is seeking information to assist in an acquisition for its Office of Information and Technology, according to a notice last week. 

The agency is considering awarding a five-year blanket purchase agreement against the General Services Administration’s multiple award schedule for application development and operations and maintenance support. In order to be awarded the project, offerors would have to participate in a source selection procedure comprising two phases.

The request states: “The mission of the Office of Information and Technology (OIT) within U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), is to deliver high-quality information technologies and services to CBP, other government agencies, the traveling public and the international trade community in support of the agency’s day-to-day activities to secure the border and facilitate trade and travel.”

OIT manages the larger agency’s IT operations and technology infrastructure to support employees’ ability to be responsive to new threats, including officers and agents who perform field operations. 

Within the request, the agency provided a sample of operations and maintenance metrics to demonstrate the issues that the Cargo Systems Program Directorate team handled from January 2023 to August 2023. 

“From May to August 2023, CSPD received between 45 to 120 new incidents per week with an average of 81 new incidents created per week,” the notice states. “CSPD teams resolved between 45 to 100 incidents a week with an average of 81 incidents resolved per week.”

CBP’s acquisition strategy, listed on the RFI, contains two phases for “offerors” to participate in, earning ratings from the agency to determine their progression through the award determination process. The award would be based on a “best-value trade-off basis,” gathered from the procedures. 

Phase one will require information offerors to address “project scenarios applicable to the subject requirement” in order to demonstrate their capabilities to support complex challenges through written technical responses. The agency would then evaluate and rate every response, letting only the highest-rated offerors be considered for the second phase. 

For the second phase, the notice states that information offerors would have to provide “technical and management approaches,” along with evaluations based on past experience and performance.