The Sun Has Not Set On Protests Of Civilian Agency Task Orders
Client Alert | 1 min read | 06.14.11
In Technatomy Corp. (June 14, 2011), GAO ruled that the sunset provision contained in the 2008 amendments to the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act ("FASA") for GAO's civilian task order protest jurisdiction applied not only to the provisions granting GAO exclusive jurisdiction over protests of task order awards in excess of $10 million, but to the entirety of subsection 41 U.S.C.§ 253j(e), and, therefore, GAO's jurisdiction over protests of task or delivery orders essentially reverted to the jurisdiction that previously existed under CICA (pre-FASA), under which there is no jurisdictional distinction between protests of awards of contracts and of task orders. The net effect is that any task order award of any value pursuant to a civilian agency contract is subject to the protest jurisdiction of GAO and possibly of the Court of Federal Claims, to the extent that court agrees with GAO's ruling.
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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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