Three Years of GAO Bid Protest Data: What the Annual Reports Really Say About Winning (and Challenging) Federal Awards
Across FY 2023–2025, GAO’s Bid Protest Annual Reports to Congress tell a consistent story: the protest system is less about “overturning awards” in a narrow win/loss sense and more about enforcing disciplined evaluation, documented source selection, and solicitation fidelity—especially when agencies are under schedule pressure or running large, complex competitions.
Start with volume and outcomes. GAO reported 2,025 cases filed in FY 2023, then a decline to 1,803 in FY 2024 and 1,688 in FY 2025. The FY 2023 spike is explicitly linked to an unusually large cluster of protests tied to HHS’s CIO-SP4 procurement, which materially inflated the year’s activity and merits outcomes. This context matters because the sustain rate—31% of protests resolved on the merits—stands out against the more typical 16% in FY 2024 and 14% in FY 2025. In other words, FY 2023 is not best read as a “new normal,” but as an event-driven year in which a single mega-procurement produced an atypically high number of sustained challenges.
Yet a second metric is more stable and arguably more informative for contractors: GAO’s “effectiveness rate,” which measures how often protesters obtain some form of relief (whether through corrective action or a GAO sustain). That figure ran 57% in FY 2023 and 52% in both FY 2024 and FY 2025. This stability supports a practical conclusion: even when merits sustains are modest, agencies frequently choose corrective action rather than litigating to a decision, and the protest forum continues to function as a meaningful accountability mechanism. GAO also emphasizes that many cases never reach a merits decision precisely because agencies take corrective action and need not report the reasons for doing so.
The “most prevalent grounds” further reinforce what sophisticated offerors already suspect: the weakest link is evaluation and source-selection rigor. In FY 2023 and FY 2024, GAO identifies unreasonable technical evaluation, flawed selection decision, and unreasonable cost or price evaluation as the leading sustain grounds. In FY 2025, unreasonable technical evaluation and unreasonable cost or price evaluation remain prominent, while “unreasonable rejection of proposal” replaces flawed selection decision among the top three. This shift is not a wholesale doctrinal change; it signals that procedural gatekeeping and compliance-based eliminations—when not clearly anchored in the solicitation—can be as outcome-determinative as the comparative tradeoff itself.
Finally, the reports highlight a governance edge case contractors should not ignore: in FY 2024 and FY 2025 GAO reported a federal agency declining to implement GAO’s recommendations, including situations that prompted GAO to recommend congressional action. Although uncommon, these episodes underscore that remedies are not purely mechanical; they exist within institutional constraints (mission urgency, regulatory conflicts, stay posture) that sophisticated protesters should assess at the outset.
Disclaimer: Information only; not legal advice. GAO statistics are high-level and context-dependent, and outcomes in any protest turn on the specific solicitation, record, and timeliness rules.