Source selection decisions are often a point of contention for federal government contractors, and rightfully so. Contractors spend large amounts of time and resources putting together a bid in a competition that likely doesn’t have room to make an award to each bidder. This usually results in one or more awardees, as well as one or more disappointed bidders. Naturally, those disappointed bidders often question whether the agency’s source selection decision, and its method for getting there, was appropriate. Unfortunately, the only way of truly discerning whether that decision was correct is to spend more time and resources protesting the decision. With a 51% effectiveness rate in 2022 (counting sustains and corrective actions), according to GAO’s annual bid protest report, it can be difficult to determine whether to even go forward with a protest when things don’t seem to add up. But, as a recent protest demonstrates, agencies make mistakes, and in this case, the fatal flaw was failure to adequately document its decision.
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GAO Sustains Protest, Reminds Government It Must Show Its Work
If a teacher has told you once, they’ve told you a thousand times, show your work. That was GAO’s reminder to GSA in its decision in Hoover Properties, B-418844 (Sept. 28, 2020). In the case, GAO sustained a protest from property management company Hoover Properties, the non-awardee of a GSA request for lease proposal (RLP), in which Hoover argued that GSA failed to provide adequate documentation for its evaluation.
Continue readingGAO Finds NASA Effectively Evaluated Risks of the Unknown
NASA is going back to the moon and is looking for private companies to help get it there. In 2018, NASA awarded nine IDIQ Commercial Lunar Payload Service contracts for commercial payload delivery services between the Earth and the lunar surface. This is a sea-change for NASA as “no [United States] commercial company has ever attempted to launch, transit, and land” on the moon.
Prior to award, NASA asked for task order proposals to include a description of risks and mitigation efforts. You might be asking–how can NASA effectively evaluate risk for something that has not been done before? A protester asked the same question, but GAO agreed with NASA’s risk analysis on the project and found the protester’s questions to be mere disagreement with the evaluation.
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