The following is an installment in Crowell & Moring’s 2023 Bid Protest Sustain of the Month Series. All through 2023, Crowell’s Government Contracts Practice will keep you up to date with a summary of the most notable bid protest sustain decision each month. Below, Crowell Partner Cherie Owen discusses several protest decisions issued in October that provide helpful insights about the GAO protest process.
September 2023 Bid Protest Sustain of the Month
The following is an installment in Crowell & Moring’s 2023 Bid Protest Sustain of the Month Series. All through 2023, Crowell’s Government Contracts Practice will keep you up to date with a summary of the most notable bid protest sustain decision each month. Below, Crowell Partner Cherie Owen and Senior Law Clerk Emily Golchini discuss Guidehouse, Inc., B‑421740, B-421740.2, Sept. 18, 2023, 2023 CPD ¶ 217, which provides helpful insight regarding what an agency must demonstrate to support an adequate personal conflict of interest investigation.
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August 2023 Bid Protest Sustain of the Month
The following is an installment in Crowell & Moring’s 2023 Bid Protest Sustain of the Month Series. All through 2023, Crowell’s Government Contracts Practice will keep you up to date with a summary of the most notable bid protest sustain decision each month. Below, Crowell Partner Cherie Owen discusses GAO’s decision in Mandex, Inc., involving organizational conflicts of interest (OCIs).
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Bite Your Tongue or Eat Your Words: GAO Reminds Contractors that Correspondence with the Agency Can Be Construed as an Agency-Level Protest, Doubling Down on a Timeliness Trap
When faced with a dissatisfying debriefing, a contractor may choose to respond to the agency to question or even rebut its evaluation. However, the recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) decision in NikSoft Systems Corporation (NikSoft) serves as an important reminder that those communications can be interpreted as agency-level protests, with potential to render subsequent GAO protests untimely.
Float Like a Butterfly (Valve), Sting Like a B(AA Requirement): GAO Issues Rare Decision Sustaining Challenge to Agency’s Application of the Buy American Act
In a polarized political environment, one area of bipartisan agreement in recent years has been renewed interest in leveraging government purchasing power to promote the domestic manufacturing base by expanding and strengthening federal “Buy America” requirements. For direct federal procurements subject to the Buy American Act (BAA), this has resulted in revised rules increasing the amount of U.S. content required to qualify a product as domestic, as well as heightened scrutiny of when waivers may be issued exempting a procurement in whole or in part from those requirements (covered here and here).
July 2023 Bid Protest Sustain of the Month
The following is an installment in Crowell & Moring’s 2023 Bid Protest Sustain of the Month Series. All through 2023, Crowell’s Government Contracts Practice will keep you up to date with a summary of the most notable bid protest sustain decision each month. Below, Crowell Partner Cherie Owen discusses MPZA, LLC, B-421568, B-421568.2, July 3, 2023, 2023 CPD ¶ 165, in which GAO discussed the amount of documentation needed to support an agency’s price analysis.
June 2023 Bid Protest Sustain of the Month
The following is an installment in Crowell & Moring’s 2023 Bid Protest Sustain of the Month Series. All through 2023, Crowell’s Government Contracts Practice will keep you up to date with a summary of the most notable bid protest sustain decision each month. Below, Crowell Partner Cherie Owen discusses Kupono Gov’t Servs., LLC; Akima Sys. Eng’g, LLC, in which GAO sustained a challenge to an agency’s corrective action.
June 2023 may go down in history as the month with the highest sustain rate in GAO’s history – if GAO published monthly sustain rate data, that is. Although GAO issued a handful of sustained decisions, one of those decisions is likely to drive GAO’s “sustain rate” statistic through the roof this year: Systems Plus, Inc. et al., which sustained 98 protests and supplemental protests related to the Chief Information Officer-Solutions and Partners (CIO-SP4) procurement. (In July, GAO issued another decision sustaining 28 additional protests and supplemental protests relating to the same procurement.) While GAO’s CIO-SP4 decisions were interesting, they may have allowed an even more impactful sustain decision to slip under the radar.
May 2023 Bid Protest Sustain of the Month
The following is an installment in Crowell & Moring’s 2023 Bid Protest Sustain of the Month Series. All through 2023, Crowell’s Government Contracts Practice will keep you up to date with a summary of the most notable bid protest sustain decision each month. Below, Crowell Partner Cherie Owen and Summer Associate Riley Flewelling discuss GAO’s decision sustaining the protest of Veteran’s Management, Inc. (“VMI”).
May closed with an impressive number publicly released GAO sustain decisions, but one stood above the rest. In Veteran’s Management, Inc., GAO clarified the requirements of agency evaluations under FAR 52.222-45, and revisited the definition of a “professional employee” discussed in GAO’s Sabre Systems, Inc. decision released earlier this year.
April 2023 Bid Protest Sustain of the Month
The following is an installment in Crowell & Moring’s 2023 Bid Protest Sustain of the Month Series. All through 2023, Crowell’s Government Contracts Practice will keep you up to date with a summary of the most notable bid protest sustain decision each month. Below, Government Contracts Partner Cherie Owen and Summer Associate Olivia Venus discuss a U.S. Government Accountability Office (“GAO”) sustain decision involving the conduct of discussions.
In Life Science Logistics, LLC(“LSL”) GSA sought proposals for services to support disaster relief efforts. Among other things, proposals were to include blueprint drawings for a proposed warehouse. After receiving and evaluating initial proposals, GSA conducted discussions with both offerors. GSA made award to Integrated Quality Solutions LLC (IQS), and LSL protested.
In response to LSL’s initial protest of the award to IQS, the Agency took voluntary corrective action. It amended the solicitation to specify its blueprint requirements and conducted a reevaluation of each technical proposal. In the initial evaluation, LSL received slightly lower ratings than IQS, but achieved “good” ratings overall. Upon reevaluation, however, the Agency assigned several significant weaknesses to LSL’s technical proposal and assigned a rating of “not acceptable.”
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March 2023 Bid Protest Sustain of the Month
The following is an installment in Crowell & Moring’s 2023 Bid Protest Sustain of the Month Series. All through 2023, Crowell’s Government Contracts Practice will keep you up to date with a summary of the most notable bid protest sustain decision each month. Below, Crowell Partner Cherie Owen discusses GAO’s decision sustaining the protest of BC Site Services, LLC, (BCSS) in which GAO found that an agency’s exchanges with offerors – even though not labeled as such – constituted discussions.
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