In just a few days the ball will drop on 2025 and we will officially usher in the new year. It’s always a good time for reflecting on the past year and what lies ahead for the new year. And that same sort of review is important when thinking about federal contract bid protests. With that in mind, we are going to take a look at the GAO’s Bid Protest Annual Report. This report is GAO’s summary of bid protests for the previous fiscal year. It contains some important insights for how GAO bid protest numbers have changed from prior years. But as our readers know, many bid protests are filed at the Court of Federal Claims, so this is only one part of the overall bid protest picture.
Here are some key points from this year:
- The key effectiveness metric, showing numbers of sustains and corrective actions at GAO, was similar to prior years, and exactly the same as 2024, at 52% for the 2025 fiscal year.
- Total bid protest numbers were down for the second year in a row, coming in at 1688 new cases filed (a 6% decrease from the prior fiscal year).
Below, we dive into the GAO numbers while comparing to the data we have on COFC protests.
The annual bid protest report is based on GAO’s statutory duty to report to Congress (1) each instance in which a federal agency did not fully implement a recommendation made by GAO (2) if any bid protest decision was “not rendered within 100 days after the date the protest is submitted,” and (3) “include a summary of the most prevalent grounds for sustaining protests.” It also summarizes the general statistics for bid protest decisions.
As with 2024, GAO met its 100-day deadline to process a bid protest in all cases. And similarly, there one was decision (ATP Gov, LLC, B-422938, Dec. 12, 2024) where the Department of the Air Force did not follow GAO’s recommendations in connection with a bid protest. That case concerned “whether the Air Force made an award to a firm whose product did not meet the material requirements of the solicitation.” This case was interesting because GAO recommended the agency either reevaluate proposals in line with the solicitation, or amend the solicitation and resolicit. But the agency refused to do either, stating that because there was no automatic stay of performance, the initial awardee had been performing the contract and implementing GAO’s recommendation that would lead to “unspecified costs and unacceptable delays.”
GAO Protest Numbers
- 1688 cases (1617 bid protests with the rest being other filings such as requests for costs), down from 1803 in FY 2024, a decrease of 6%.
- 380 – Number of cases decided on the merits, rather than through dismissal.
- 53 – Number of sustained protests (roughly 14%)
- 14% – Percentage of sustained protests out of those decided on the merits, similar to 3 out of the last 4 years.
- 52% – Effectiveness rate (percentage sustained or where agency took corrective action). This shows that over half of all GAO bid protests continue to result in a sustain or corrective action. A roughly 50% effectiveness rate has been the norm for the last few years, with FY 2021 being the last time that number fell below 50%.
- 0.5% – Percentage of cases with hearings—which amounts to 3 cases. This is routine for GAO since hearings are not a common occurrence here.
Why Are Cases Sustained?
The report summarizes the common reasons for sustaining protests at GAO. These are helpful to know what types of issues are most likely to get traction at GAO, although GAO is not too generous on detail. The three most common grounds (and an example of each) were:
- Unreasonable technical evaluation, such as “finding the agency’s technical evaluation of the awardee’s proposal unreasonable, in part, where under the management and staffing approach element, the agency credited the awardee as proposing staff for the required 11-month period, but the awardee only proposed staffing for 9 months.” emissary LLC, B-422388.3, July 29, 2025.
- Unreasonable cost or price evaluation, such as “finding the agency’s cost/price evaluation unreasonable where the awardee’s proposal failed to include its subcontractor’s cost/price information, as required by the solicitation, and the agency improperly attempted to cure the awardee’s proposal by creating the information that the awardee failed to provide by developing a risk-adjusted price using other information in the awardee’s proposal.” KBR Servs., LLC, B-422697, Oct. 4, 2024.
- Unreasonable rejection of proposal, such as “finding the agency’s decision to reject the protester’s quotation for providing labor categories (LCATs) under special item numbers (SINs) other than the SIN under which the solicitation was issued unreasonable where the solicitation did not expressly limit vendors from quoting LCATs under a specific SIN.” SynergisT JV, LLC, B-422384.2, Mar. 11, 2025.
COFC Bid Protest Report
The Court of Federal Claims (COFC) last released its annual report for FY 2024. It’s useful to compare the GAO bid protest report to that of the other main bid protest forum, the COFC.
That report showed that there were 266 bid protest cases filed at COFC in FY 2024. That is an increase of almost 100 cases (an over 50% increase) from the 169 cases filed in FY 2023, per the 2023 report. There are fewer cases filed at the COFC than at GAO, but the bid protest numbers are rapidly growing at COFC. For instance, the FY 2024 number of 266 is over twice as many bid protests filed at the COFC in FY 2022, which was 123, which explains in part the ongoing trend of lower number of protests being filed at GAO.
Unfortunately, the COFC report provides no details on sustain rate, corrective action rate, or reasons for sustaining protests.
Other potential explanations for the decreased case load at GAO include (1) enhanced debriefings implemented by DoD that provide more information about why companies lost an award. (2) Fewer federal contractors overall and fewer contracts. As larger companies have consolidated, there are fewer small businesses. And (3) Category management has been pegged by some as resulting in a decrease in overall contracts, as more contracts are pushed to government wide acquisition contracts (or GWACs). This latter trend is likely to continue as the Revolutionary Far Overhaul (with its “required use” contracts) and Executive Orders (Eliminating Waste and Saving Taxpayer Dollars by Consolidating Procurement) call for increased consolidation.
We at SmallGovCon can help you decide if a GAO or COFC protest may be right for your company, based on what types of arguments can be successful at GAO versus COFC and the process at each tribunal. It will be interesting to see if GAO protest numbers continue to go down next year, with COFC numbers increasing. We’ll keep you updated as we follow the trends on federal bid protests.
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