Correction: This article was updated on June 12 to reflect the full title of a General Services Administration official who administers telecommunications and network acquisition programs.<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n
About a third of federal agencies including the Social Security Administration, the U.S. Postal Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture will have another 12 months to transition to a long-delayed $50 billion telecommunications contract, delaying their transition to modern systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security were given until 2026<\/a> to complete their transitions, in part because of hardships they cited related the pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The General Services Administration has been trying to bring agencies onto the 15-year contract vehicle for several years. It\u2019s been a complex, and at times, slow process<\/a>. It\u2019s a huge contract involving 32 types of services such as high-speed internet and telephones, utilizing millions of data circuits and nine vendors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The transition was further disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing supply chain shortages. Agencies made the case for more time as the May 31 deadline neared, and 82 agencies have so-called continuity-of-service agreements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The predecessor contract vehicle, Networx, has been in place for a decade and was extended twice. <\/a>Now, as federal agencies transition to the Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions contract at different speeds, government watchdogs have warned that delays could lead to cost overruns and service inefficiencies for agencies who are hampered by the limited extensions. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Federal agencies were originally told to fully transition their services by September 2022. As of March of this year,<\/a> 123 of 222 agencies and tribal governments had fully completed the move.<\/p>\n\n\n\n GSA stopped accepting contract modifications to the old contracts, and its inspector general<\/a> warned that any prolonged use of legacy systems \u201cerodes potential cost savings from EIS.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The last two times the government underwent this large of a IT overhaul, cost overruns in the hundreds of millions were the result of significant delays. The transition to Networx took 33 months longer than expected, and most agencies experienced delays that led to an increase of $66.4 million to GSA and a loss of $329 million in projected savings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One problem during that period was agencies were continuing to order services from the predecessor well after the same offerings were available on the new contract, according to a Government Accountability Office <\/a>report from 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\t