The following is an installment in Crowell & Moring’s Bid Protest Sustain of the Month Series. Each month, Crowell’s Government Contracts Practice highlights notable bid protest sustain decisions. Below, Crowell Consultant (and former GAO Bid Protest Hearing Officer) Cherie Owen discusses two decisions where GAO rejected agency attempts at gamesmanship in the protest process.
Two of GAO’s four December 2025 sustain decisions stand out for their firm rejection of agencies’ questionable defense tactics. In the first, Tiger Natural Gas, Inc., GAO rejected an agency’s attempts to limit document production through excessive redaction of record documents. In Tiger Natural Gas (discussed in more detail here), the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) produced a protest record consisting largely of heavily redacted proposal and evaluation documents—leaving only offeror names and overall ratings visible. DLA further relied on a generic declaration from a technical evaluator, which provided no meaningful insight into the agency’s contemporaneous evaluation. GAO found this approach unacceptable, chastising the agency for producing a record so limited that “nothing more than [the] mere existence [of documents] can be gleaned.”
GAO explained that a protective order protects sensitive information, negating concerns about a “fishing expedition.” The decision stressed that agencies must provide an adequate record to allow for GAO to assess the reasonableness of their actions. Because the DLA failed to do so, GAO sustained the protest, signaling it will not let agencies hide behind a “sea of black.”
In Solvere Technical Group, LLC, an agency adopted an interpretation inconsistent with the solicitation’s plain language and directly contrary to its own interpretation of identical language in a prior procurement under the same IDIQ contract. GAO again rejected the agency’s gamesmanship.
In Solvere, the Department of the Navy’s Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) sought to procure IT services. The solicitation required offerors to identify key personnel by name but permitted “TBD” designations for non-key positions without identified staff. The protester complied with this requirement, noting the staffing for several non-key positions was “TBD.” However, the evaluators criticized Solvere’s proposal, assigning a significant weakness because Solvere indicated that a number of its non-key personnel were “TBD” and therefore the agency was unable to assess their qualifications. The agency asserted that Solvere should have attempted to “minimize the number of proposed labor personnel for which candidates have not been identified.”
GAO sustained the protest, finding the agency’s interpretation inconsistent with the solicitation’s plain language and noting the agency had recently argued for precisely the opposite interpretation of the solicitation’s terms. In a prior protest of another task order issued under the same IDIQ contract, NSWC had asserted that identical solicitation language “made clear the Navy did not intend to, and in fact could not, assess the qualifications of these unidentified personnel.” GAO found the agency’s criticisms unreasonable and unsupported, noting that nothing in the solicitation put offerors on notice that they should limit their use of TBD positions or risk having their proposals downgraded.
Together, the Tiger Natural Gas and the Solvere decisions demonstrate that while GAO affords agencies deference, this deference is not carte blanche. GAO will put its foot down when agency defense tactics elevate attempting to win a protest over the integrity of the procurement process.