After four consecutive years of declining bid protests, the total number of protests filed by industry jumped 22% in fiscal 2022 — up 367 protests over fiscal 2021’s total — and the most since industry lodged 2,149 protests in 2020.

Yet the Government Accountability Office’s annual bid protest report, issued to Congress Oct. 26, offers a succinct, specific reason for the increased filings. A single governmentwide acquisition contract, the Health and Human Services Department’s Chief Information Officer-Solutions and Partners 4  — or CIO-SP4 — received more than 300 bid protests on its own. The contract has a shared ceiling of $50 billion that covers health, biomedical, scientific, administrative, operational, managerial and information systems, and it is a coveted landing place for hundreds of vendors aiming to compete for government task orders over the next 10 years.

“That’s the story when you look at the number of cases filed with one large procurement, the lion’s share of protests were filed in that particular procurement,” Edward Goldstein, managing associate general for procurement law at GAO’s Office of General Counsel, told Nextgov/FCW.

GAO ultimately sustained — or sided with industry — on 119 of those cases, an unusually high number of sustained protests for a single procurement, as GAO identified problems with how the agency was making awards. CIO-SP4’s controversial nature, therefore, more than doubled the bid protest sustain rate for fiscal 2023: up to 31% from 13% last year.

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