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DoD Renews Its Request to Limit CFC Bid Protest Jurisdiction Dramatically

Client Alert | 1 min read | 04.22.16

In its legislative proposal package sent to Congress on April 12, 2016, the DoD is again seeking to curtail the CFC’s bid protest jurisdiction significantly by importing nearly all of GAO’s rigid timeliness rules into the Tucker Act, 28 U.S.C. § 1491(b), with the stated goals of “reducing the time to decide bid protests by avoiding unnecessarily repetitive protests” and eliminating an “unintended forum shopping practice that has arisen under the existing bid protest system[.]” For a detailed review of the similar DoD legislative proposal in 2012, see this post, where we explain why the proposed change, among other things, (1) will not fully address DoD’s “second bite at the apple” concerns, (2) will deny many prospective protesters a “first bite,” and (3) may have a significant effect on the types and numbers of protests filed in the GAO and the CFC.

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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].”...