Operation Warp Speed

Research Tools: Federal Procurement Data System

Eureka!

Hello Liberty Lad supporters!

As I am sure you are aware, Liberty Lad LLC (L4C) is dedicated to helping you do your own research, so that you can educate yourself. Unless this is the first article you are reading from L4C, you are also aware that I am deeply involved in the medical freedom and government accountability movement being pursued by Feds for Freedom (F4F).

F4F intends to educate the public on the inner workings of Operation Warp Speed (OWS) and we have put together a small group of crack researchers. We will be publishing informational products and updates on a regular basis for F4F. It is also a great opportunity to provide some real world examples, and show you how you can make the most of free analytical resources.

Some of the research tools can be used to conduct competitive market analysis and other purely commercial purposes, but in our case we are looking into OWS contracts.

BLUF: The Federal Procurement Data System is a powerful research tool and can help you conduct in depth research on government contractors and their business dealings with the USG. Advanced Technology International (ATI) has been a government contractor since the mid 2000s, and they were awarded an Other Transaction Authority (OTA) contract to develop the mRNA injection for OWS. The scope of their government work goes beyond pandemic preparedness; please read the Substack to familiarize yourself with this free research tool, and a future Substack will dive into ATI details.

Call to action: If you want to help our research team examine the details surrounding execution of OWS, please send me an email at Jim@fedsforfreedom.org or jameserdman@libertylad.com.

Without further ado…

Resource 1: Federal Procurement Data System - Next Generation (FPDS)

The US Department of Defense (DOD) utilized Other Transaction Authority (OTA) as a legal instrument to ensure vaccine development, production, and distribution could progress without the need to comply with laws and regulations typically applicable to procurement contracts. We will have a stand-alone Substack to discuss the implications of OTAs, but AcqNotes summed up the key take-aways for us.

The FPDS really only lists standard contract vehicles with the government, so you might be asking yourself, how does this help us understand OWS?

Although the federal government implied that much of the work was conducted between April 2020 through its transfer to the White House COVID-19 Response Team in February 2021, that characterization was intentionally misleading. There were decades of research and work being conducted before Op Warp Speed: Inside the Operation That Beat COVID, the Critics, and the Odds was published with an overly self-congratulatory take on the program. Reading the book, one might come away with the conclusion that a group of researchers developed and executed OWS early in 2020, defying the odds with their miracle cure. That wasn’t the case.

We need to deep dive into the contracts and companies that made OWS a reality, and while ATI was the recipient of the OWS’ OTA contract, they have been awarded numerous contracts that fall within standard authorities that can be found on FPDS. Before searching FPDS records lets define the terminology used in FDPS.

Legal Business Name: The name used in the contract vehicle by the business servicing a government contract.

North American Industry Classification System - NAICS (code): It is used by federal statistical agencies to accurately label the type of industry in which a given business is engaged.

Contracting Agency: The agency holding the contract.

Contracting Office: The office responsible for the activity of the contractor.

Product and Service Code (PSC): It is a four digit code used by all federal government contractors to define the type of activities and services being supplied to the client. A full list of PSCs can be found here.

Unique Entity ID: A code used for every contracting company.

Ultimate Parent Unique Entity ID: A code used for a parent contracting company, or if the contract was subcontracted to another entity.

When you conduct a general search for “Advanced Technology International” (ATI) you get a LOT of results.

Not all of the 10,532 results are directly related to the contractor or type of contracting in which we are most interested.

We get R&D and engineering (PSC AZ11), and weapons - applied research/exploratory development (AC52) as some of the results. That is interesting grist for further exploratory drilling. So when we search for ATI and AC52, the search gets narrowed to 34 results, but not all are for the company ATI. Among the results, there are a few companies like SAIC.

The best way to refine this search is to search using ATI’s Unique Entity ID LDMMF472BB93. We end up identifying 4993 results.

You’ll find ATI is often called Advanced Technology Institute. This is sometimes listed as the parent legal business name. We are left with a whole host of results that are too numerous to sift through by hand… Not for anyone pursuing this information as a hobby.

Next step is to refine our search. In the search bar, there is an option for an “advanced” search. When you open the drop down menu in the advanced search option, it gives quite a few ways to refine the search, but in this case we are going to use the NIACS option and include the term “life sciences”.

After that initial search, I came up with a more manageable list of results, but I decided to add an additional PCS search criteria “weapons”, which refined the results further. You can use multiple search criteria in the advanced search option.

LDMMF472BB93 PRODUCT_OR_SERVICE_DESCRIPTION:"weapons" NAICS_DESCRIPTION:"life sciences"

After using just a few terms, I was able to get down to 13 results that may be of interest. The great thing about the website, you can immediately turn those results into a shareable PDF or Excel document. You can download my search results here (PDF) and here (Excel).

Before going into other search criteria and results, let’s take a quick look at what else we can gather from our search results.

Contracting agency: Every agency has their own contracting code. The full list of agency contracting codes can be found here. In this case 1700 corresponds to the US Navy. The contracting office name NSWC stands for the Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane Division.

There are two PSC Codes related to our narrowed search results: AC52 and 1095. If there were two codes covering the same products, a number of these codes were end-dated in 2020. It is unclear if AC52 and 1095 are the same codes, but AC52 was end-dated in October 2020. AC52 was already defined, but 1095 falls into the miscellaneous category.

Indefinite Delivery Vehicle (IDV) is established by an award from the Federal Supply Schedule (FSS), Governmentwide Acquisition Contracts (GWAC), or Basic Ordering Agreement (BOA). The determination of the type of IDV is defined by the requirements of the FAR. The IDV reference number included in the report, identifies the code being used for a contractual agreement to provide goods and services. This can be another valuable search criteria.

Now let’s go back to a generalized search and take a closer look at the Interagency Contract Directory (ICD) tab. Instead of using the specified code for ATI, lets do a text search again for “Advanced Technology International”.

We get the original 10,532 results, as happened during the initial search; however, when we click on the ICD tab, we see that we only have seven results. They represent the existing indefinite vehicle contracts that are being drawn upon to satisfy government supply and service needs. Other agencies are able to examine those contracts and determine if they can use them to satisfy their requirements before starting the process of drawing up new contracts with other vendors. It is intended to improve efficiency.

Like the other results, they can be easily turned into a PDF or excel file. I formatted the results into a separate excel spreadsheet so we can take a close look at the IDV contracts currently active and the amount of money dedicated to these contracts.

Remember, these are existing contracts that have money acquired and allocated, and a ceiling limit related to how much money can be obligated against the contract. I am not familiar enough with government contracting to know if one 10 or 20 billion dollar contract is a commonplace IDV contract, but … it seems like a lot of money to this suburban dweller.

We can also look at the contracting office in more detail.

There is nothing surprising here. We all knew that ATI was tied to big dollar contracts. I think the surprise will become apparent, when we take a look at the scope of the research for which ATI was responsible. ATI will be the subject of a separate Substack and it will be eye-opening. Whitney Webb published one podcast that touched on ATI and is a good place to start if some of you are curious.

Contractdirectory.gov is another tool for your contract related search. I encourage you to take a look and check out its features. I find it less user friendly than FDPS, but send me a message or comment and let me know what you think.

Please reach out to me in email or comment if you are familiar with government contracting or FPDS and have additional insights. If anyone has time on their hands, and wants to volunteer for our project… send me an email at Jim@fedsforfreedom.org or Jameserdman@libertylad.com