GAO Denies Air Force "Leeway" to Conduct Tradeoff Using Paired Proposals
Client Alert | 1 min read | 12.09.19
In a recent decision, Blue Origin Florida, LLC, GAO sustained a pre-award protest challenging the stated basis for award in an Air Force solicitation for two competitive, fixed-price contracts for space launch services. While the solicitation included evaluation criteria and their relative importance, it did not contemplate a standard source selection whereby the agency would conduct one-to-one tradeoff analyses to determine the top two best value proposals. Instead, the solicitation required award to the two offerors that, “when combined,” represented the best value to the government.
The Air Force sought to justify this approach by arguing that the top two ranked proposals might not provide the best overall value to the government if, for example, they shared common strengths and weaknesses, whereas a lower ranked proposal might possess strengths and weaknesses that complement those of a higher-ranked proposal. GAO sustained the protest, reasoning that “short of colluding with other potential offerors to coordinate their respective proposals, it is not apparent how an offeror could intelligently compete” because the offeror would be evaluated according to its general compatibility with another’s proprietary bid and not the merits of its own proposal.
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Client Alert | 3 min read | 11.21.25
On November 7, 2025, in Thornton v. National Academy of Sciences, No. 25-cv-2155, 2025 WL 3123732 (D.D.C. Nov. 7, 2025), the District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed a False Claims Act (FCA) retaliation complaint on the basis that the plaintiff’s allegations that he was fired after blowing the whistle on purported illegally discriminatory use of federal funding was not sufficient to support his FCA claim. This case appears to be one of the first filed, and subsequently dismissed, following Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s announcement of the creation of the Civil Rights Fraud Initiative on May 19, 2025, which “strongly encourages” private individuals to file lawsuits under the FCA relating to purportedly discriminatory and illegal use of federal funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in violation of Executive Order 14173, Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity (Jan. 21, 2025). In this case, the court dismissed the FCA retaliation claim and rejected the argument that an organization could violate the FCA merely by “engaging in discriminatory conduct while conducting a federally funded study.” The analysis in Thornton could be a sign of how forthcoming arguments of retaliation based on reporting allegedly fraudulent DEI activity will be analyzed in the future.
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