What GAO’s FY2025 Bid Protest Report Signals to Federal Contractors—and Why “The Solicitation as Written” Still Wins
GAO’s FY2025 bid protest report to Congress is not a doctrinal treatise; it is a governance document about the integrity of competition, the practical limits of remedies, and the recurring evaluation failures that continue to generate sustained protests. Signed by GAO General Counsel Edda Emmanuelli Perez, the report emphasizes a procedural anchor point that matters to both agencies and offerors: GAO decided every FY2025 protest within the Competition in Contracting Act’s 100-day deadline. For contractors, that consistency is consequential because protest strategy is inseparable from business continuity—incumbent performance risk, capture timing, and the cost of delay all depend on predictable adjudication windows.
The data also help calibrate expectations. GAO received 1,688 cases in FY2025 and closed 1,737, with 359 closures attributable to GAO’s task-order protest jurisdiction. The sustain rate on merits decisions was 14%, while the effectiveness rate—GAO’s measure of whether a protester obtained some form of relief through either a sustain or agency corrective action—was 52%. The immediate takeaway for a federal contractor is that the “win condition” is often not a published sustain; it is obtaining corrective action in a posture that reopens the competition or meaningfully reshapes the evaluation record. GAO’s report explicitly underscores that many protests do not reach a merits decision because agencies take voluntary corrective action, and agencies do not have to report why they do so. That asymmetry should influence how contractors document evaluation errors early and present them in a way that makes corrective action the rational path for the agency.
GAO’s identification of the most prevalent sustain grounds is especially resonant for proposal teams because it maps cleanly to controllable contractor behaviors. In FY2025, GAO most often sustained protests for unreasonable technical evaluation, unreasonable cost or price evaluation, and unreasonable rejection of a proposal. Each of these categories, in practice, tends to turn on traceability: whether the record supports the evaluation conclusions, whether the agency applied the evaluation scheme as announced, and whether exclusions were grounded in solicitation language rather than post hoc interpretation. Contractors that design their proposals to be “audit-ready”—with explicit cross-references from claims to evidence—are better positioned both to win at evaluation and, if necessary, to show why the evaluation was not reasonable.
Finally, the report’s most vivid case study is not about a contractor mistake; it is about remedy erosion when timing, performance, and institutional constraints collide. GAO describes one FY2025 instance in which an agency declined to fully implement GAO’s recommendation: an Air Force procurement involving satellite terminal assemblies where the solicitation represented that certification was required at proposal submission, yet award went to an offeror whose product was not certified at that time. The Air Force later argued that because there was no automatic stay of performance, the awardee continued performing, making reevaluation or resolicitation too costly and delayed, and GAO reports that the agency would reimburse protest costs but not fully implement the recommended corrective action. The practical lesson for contractors is not abstract: when a CICA stay is available, timing decisions around debriefings and protest filings can meaningfully affect the remedies that remain realistic. And when remedies shrink, the dispute can shift from competition restoration to cost reimbursement—an outcome that rarely makes a business whole.
Disclaimer: This article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Bid protest outcomes are highly fact-specific; contractors should consult qualified counsel regarding strategy, timeliness rules, debriefing posture, and forum selection for any particular procurement.