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Last month, in National Government Services, Inc. (“NGS”) v. United Statesa pre-award bid protest handled by Crowell & Moring—the Federal Circuit ruled that “workload caps” imposed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (“CMS”) in its administration of the Medicare Program violated the Competition in Contracting Act’s (“CICA”) “full-and-open competition” requirement. In

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On March 22, 2018, the Department of Defense (DoD), Office of the Under Secretary of Defense issued a Class Deviation letter to the heads of all Department of Defense agencies requiring, effective immediately, that every DoD agency ensure that its contracting officers implement the recommendations for enhanced post-award debriefings set forth in Section 818 of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

The direction makes clear that DoD agencies are to provide unsuccessful offerors who are given a debriefing in accordance with FAR 15.506(d) the opportunity to “submit additional questions related to the debriefing within two business days after receiving the debriefing.”  The agency will then be required to “respond in writing to the additional questions submitted by an unsuccessful offeror within five business days after receipt of the questions” and must hold the debriefing open until it “delivers its written responses to the unsuccessful offeror.”Continue Reading DoD Implements New Enhanced Debriefing Procedures from the 2018 NDAA

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CORRECTION (5/15/12): A prior version of this blog post first posted on May 11, 2012, analyzed the proposed amendment to the Tucker Act discussed herein under the mistaken impression that it had been part of the committee mark version of the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act. We have since learned that the proposed amendment to the Tucker Act was not included in the bill that went to committee vote. The below analysis has been altered to examine the proposed legislation in the proper context. We apologize for the error.

On April 25, 2012, the Department of Defense submitted proposed legislation to the House Armed Services Committee for consideration in the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would dramatically amend the Tucker Act, 28 U.S.C. § 1491(b), by importing essentially all of the GAO’s rigid timeliness rules with regard to bid protest actions and applying them to protests filed before the U.S. Court of Federal Claims (COFC). Amongst the GAO timeliness rules currently contained in 4 C.F.R. § 21 that DoD proposed to be added to the Tucker Act and apply to the COFC include: 

  • The absolute rule that pre-award solicitation challenges must be filed before the submission date for proposals; 
  • The rule that any post-award protest must be filed within 10 days of when an offeror knows or should have known of the basis for protest, unless subject to a mandatory debriefing, in which case the protest must be filed within 10 days of that debriefing, and;
  • In the event that an agency protest has been filed, the rule that a COFC protest must be filed within 10 days of when the offeror knew or should have known of the adverse decision in the agency protest. 

Continue Reading Proposed Revisions to the Tucker Act Would Dramatically Change the Bid Protest Landscape