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GAO Faults USTRANSCOM’s Past Performance Evaluation of Awardee’s “Miniscule” Past Work

Client Alert | 1 min read | 04.03.17

In XPO Logistics Worldwide Gov’t Servs., LLC (released Mar. 21, 2017), in which C&M co-represented XPO, GAO sustained a protest challenging the awardee’s past performance rating, setting aside USTRANSCOM’s award of a $3B freight services contract. GAO found that the value of the awardee’s past efforts are extremely small relative to the value of the requirement, that the contemporaneous record did not explain the basis for the agency’s determination that these tiny past efforts were somewhat relevant under the solicitation, and that the agency’s post hoc reevaluation during the protest was unreasonable. GAO recommended that the agency reevaluate the awardee’s past performance and then make a new award decision.

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Client Alert | 2 min read | 09.22.25

Department of Education Discontinues Discretionary Grant Funding for Minority-Serving Institutions

The Department of Education (DOE) announced on September 10, 2025, that it will end discretionary funding to several Minority-Serving Institution (MSI) grant programs that, it stated, “discriminate by conferring government benefits exclusively to institutions that meet racial or ethnic quotas.”[1] The agency stated that it would “us[e] its statutory authority to reprogram discretionary funds to programs that do not present such concerns.”[2] This announcement follows a July 2025 decision by the Department of Justice to no longer defend the constitutionality of a provision of the Higher Education Act of 1965 (HEA) that authorizes grant funding to Hispanic-Serving institutions, after determining that such programs “violate the equal-protection component of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.”[3]...

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