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Agency Acceptably Disqualifies Offeror For Refusal To Wall Off Employee

Client Alert | 1 min read | 03.26.09

In Kellogg Brown & Root Servs., Inc. (Feb. 23, 2009), the agency excluded KBR from two future Army task order competitions when the agency's CO had inadvertently forwarded source selection sensitive and contractor proprietary information to KBR's contracts manager and program manager and KBR later refused to "wall off" or isolate the project manager from the task order competitions. GAO upheld the exclusion, even though the agency admitted that it could not definitively conclude that KBR had actually obtained an unfair competitive advantage and even though the company had taken steps to permanently delete the sensitive information from its computers and email servers and the program manager had signed a sworn statement that he had not retained the sensitive information and could not remember the contents of the email.

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Client Alert | 3 min read | 06.12.26

DOJ Guidance Backs Away From Disparate Impact Liability

On June 9, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a formal opinion concluding that the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission’s (EEOC) existing interpretations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII) disparate-impact liability, including the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures (UGESP), are unconstitutional. According to the opinion, EEOC’s prior interpretations contemplate liability based on disproportionately adverse effects alone, without regard to an employer’s likely intent, rather than treating disparate impact as an evidentiary mechanism to “smoke out” intentional discrimination. DOJ found that this approach functions as a “qualified racial-proportionality mandate” that places “a racial thumb on the scales, often requiring employers to evaluate the racial outcomes of their policies, and to make decisions based on (because of) those racial outcomes.” The opinion fulfills one mandate of Executive Order 14281, which rejected disparate-impact liability insofar as it “creates a near insurmountable presumption that unlawful discrimination exists wherever there are any differences in outcomes among different [demographic groups].”...

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