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Speak Now Or Forever Hold Your Protest: Intervenor’s Silence Waives Future Protest Grounds

Client Alert | less than 1 min read | 05.05.21

When is the deadline to file a bid protest, and what actions or inactions can cause potential future protest arguments to be waived?  These seemingly simple questions can have surprising answers.  In a recent bid protest decision, GAO held that a contract awardee can waive potential protest grounds by failing to raise them when intervening in a competitor’s bid protest of its award.  See VS2, LLC, B-418942.4, B-418942.5, Feb. 25, 2021, 2021 CPD ¶ --, 2021 WL 873343.  C&M’s Eric Ransom and Rob Sneckenberg explain the VS2 decision and provide useful takeaways for contract awardees in this “Feature Comment” published in The Government Contractor.

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Client Alert | 4 min read | 10.30.26

Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right: GAO Sustains Protest Where Agency Tried to Fix PIA Violation with a Second PIA Violation

Recent sustain decisions by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) in Fluor Federal Solutions, LLC and Reliance Test & Technology send a clear message: when an agency tries to fix a Procurement Integrity Act (PIA) violation by committing a second one, the cure can be just as fatal as the disease. The cases involved the U.S. Air Force’s $1.8 billion procurement for O&M services at Elgin Air Force Base. During discussions, the Air Force inadvertently released a pricing overview slide with all offerors’ bottom-line evaluated costs to Reliance Test & Technology, which immediately notified the agency of the error. In response, the Air Force decided to level the playing field by providing the same information to all the other offerors in the procurement, stating, “[o]fferors may consider this disclosure in their [final proposal revision].”...