The Government Accountability Office (“GAO”) released its Annual Report to Congress for Fiscal Year 2024 (B-158766), summarizing bid protest activity during the 2024 fiscal year. The FY24 bid protest statistics reflect a continuation of recent trends, and course correction after the FY23 statistics were skewed by the 100+ protests challenging the Department of Health and Human Services’ government-wide acquisition contract, the Chief Information Officer-Solutions and Partners 4 (“CIO-SP4”).
Overall, the number of protests is fairly steady, the effectiveness rate remains high (over 50 percent), and hearings are increasingly rare (just one in the last year).
Overall Course Correction After CIO-SP4
In FY23, GAO reported 2,025 filed cases, a 22-percent increase from FY22. However, there were many protests challenging a single large-scale procurement, CIO-SP4, which skewed the data. The FY24 bid protests data picks up where FY22, FY21, and FY20 left off. There were 1,803 protests filed in FY24, consistent with the slight downward trend GAO experienced from FY20 (2,149 protests filed), FY21 (1,897 protests filed), and FY22 (1,658 protests filed). Excluding FY23 and the CIO-SP4 procurement, GAO continues to experience a slight decrease in protests filed since FY20. While there were about 95 more protests filed in FY24 than in FY22, there were more than 300 fewer protests filed in FY24 than in FY20.
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