The expiration of a government contract could lead to hundreds of people losing their jobs in Albuquerque.
The company that employs those workers, Science Applications International Corp., is expected to lay off about 269 employees on April 9, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification letter filed with the state last month. The layoffs are the result of an information technology services contract with Sandia National Laboratories that is expiring.
Bumping rights do not exist but "resources will be made available for the affected employees in their search for alternative employment inside the company, as well as with other companies," the notice says.
The expiration of the SAIC contract will follow a large award to another firm, Encantado Technical Solutions, which recently nabbed an information technology support contract estimated to be worth between $400 million and $700 million. The award consolidated several previous agreements, one of which was the contract with SAIC, according to Sandia labs.
Encantado is a one-year-old firm in Albuquerque offering information technology and cybersecurity services, in addition to systems engineering and artificial intelligence. The firm is a joint venture between Maryland technology and professional services company Edgewater and ECS, a large company in Virginia providing a range of technical, scientific and engineering services.
While the loss of the contract at SAIC will lead to layoffs, it is "likely that Encantado will look to bring onboard roughly 90%" of the affected employees, SAIC human resources representative Suwane Holmes-Poole said. She added that "the successor to a contractor tends to keep as many people as they can because thats where the knowledge base is."
A similar situation occurred in 2019, when Maryland-based Systems Integration Inc. was to begin work on a Transportation Security Administration help desk contract with almost 100 employees. But most of those employees were to come from Virginia-based Leidos, Business First reported.
