GAO’s annual bid protest report is a fall tradition for federal contracting attorneys. It’s perhaps not quite as tasty as stuffing in my book, but always interesting. In it, GAO summarizes its slate of bid protests for the previous fiscal year, and we can glean insights from how the protest numbers have changed from prior years.
Here are some key points from this year: (1) the key effectiveness metric, showing numbers of sustains and corrective actions at GAO, was up again to 51% for the 2022 fiscal year and (2) total bid protest numbers are down slightly, continuing a trend from the last few years…
Many have theorized why protests are done. For instance, the enhanced debriefings implemented by DoD provide more information about why companies lost an award. This may eliminate those protests where a company just simply wanted more information. Anecdotally, I think there is truth to this theory. I have personally seen protests avoided where a company found out through a debriefing that its proposal was missing some key information.
Another possible reason for reduced protests is simply that there are less federal contractors over all and fewer contracts. As larger companies have consolidated, there are fewer small businesses. And, 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) …
