Under Contract

• The United States Tax Court is pouring $118,483 into upgrades for its wireless networks to protect it from “penetration attacks, rogue wireless devices,

denial-of-service attacks, and other wireless threats.” Presidio Networked Solutions won the contract, which includes procuring new equipment and upgrading existing networks.

• The Department of the Army awarded a $120,510 contract to the Cloudberry Language School to supply 45 English and Arabic-speaking “role players” to the United States Military Academy in West Point “as part of situational exercises and as interpreters as part of those exercises.” The contract includes travel and lodging costs, according to contract documents.  

• The Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is spending more than $59,000 on gopher trapping in Oregon. Evergreen Reforestation has been signed on to help with the effort, which the bureau says is needed because “gophers are making it difficult to establish new vegetation.” The traps kill the gophers instantly and “dead gopher carcasses would be left on each unit as food for eagles, ravens, and hawks.” It’s not clear how long the contract will last, but the BLM says the trappings will occur during the summer months until 2019. 

• The Defense Department inked a $14.5 million contract with Potomac River Group to conduct security clearance interviews and polygraph exams. The contract documents say the company will provide an estimated 1,400 security interviews — which last three hours each — but not more than two per day. Potomac River Group will also conduct a projected 3,000 polygraph tests during the length of the contract. The polygraph sessions last about four hours, but can go longer if, for example, the interviewee has to make “a written statement following elicitation of a relevant admission.”

• The U.S. Agency for International Development mission in Malawi awarded a $1.6 million contract to Nova Publications — a company in India — “to print, bind, deliver, and distribute” more than 4.5 million books for students in both English and Chichewa, the official language of Malawi. Aslo, the company will also print 155,609 teachers’ guides for the Government of Malawi’s Ministry of Education Science and Technology.