About a third of all National Archives and Records Administration personnel have lost regular access to email, thanks to faulty network equipment worth about $121,000 and a half-year long saga of failed replacement acquisitions.

Personnel within NARA's office of general counsel have lost email service for at least a full day and senior management, including officials in the office of the archivist, have had diminished access, according to a NARA justification and approval for a sole source acquisition of Hewlett Packard equipment.

"This disruption of email services has resulted in the inability for over 1,200 National Archives employees to access email and continue work in a usual manner," says the notice, which appeared online Nov. 10. NARA employs 3,483 full-time permanent and other personnel, according to figures from its fiscal 2009 performance and accountability report.

In the J&A, NARA officials say they discovered a need for the HP network equipment--a host bus adapter card and a fiber channel pass through module--during early summer.

They first tried buying the equipment through a General Services Administration schedule, but learned that they couldn't, since the adapter card doesn't comply with the Trade Agreements Act, which is embodied in Part 25 of the Federal Acquisition Regulation. The TAA mandates that when federal agencies buy equipment worth more than $203,000, the gear should originate either domestically or from a long list of countries party to certain kinds of trade relationships with the United States.

The list of countries covered by the TAA is most notable for the countries the regulations exclude--namely, India, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and the People's Republic of China.

Although the NARA equipment value clearly is below the TAA threshold, GSA has made it a condition of granting a schedule to private sector companies that all equipment, irrespective of size order, sold through a schedule must be TAA compliant. Other government-wide purchasing vehicles, such as NASA's SEWP program, don't require that.

After finding that GSA wouldn't work out, NARA officials then tried buying the equipment by issuing a stand-alone solicitation. But, when they awarded a contract, the equipment they received turned out to be a likely counterfeit, the J&A states. "At the very least the equipment was 'grey market' such that HP would not honor the warranty," it adds.

"NARA's inability to procure the necessary HP equipment has resulted in an ever expanding deterioration of email service to approximately 1,400 NARA users," the J&A says.

"Absent the HP replacement parts the NARA network cannot once again become a fully functioning email system," it concludes, stating that NARA will now buy the adapter card and module directly from the source.

For more:
- go to the online notice, or download directly the J&A (.doc)

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