New decisions, rules and guidance a contracting officer should know about, with the line that actually matters. This issue is as it was published on 19 October 2026; later issues carry what has moved since.
16 Oct 2026GAO · FAR overhaulGAO denied Casey & Company LLC's protest of a National Park Service award to Brann Services LLC under RFQ 140P1326Q0029, a small business set-aside for leaf removal at Rock Creek Park issued 26 June 2026 under Revolutionary FAR Overhaul part 12 commercial procedures, which the Department of the Interior adopted by a department-wide class deviation effective 31 March 2026. Casey emailed its quotation to the contracting officer on 23 July, six days before the noon deadline of 29 July, but the agency's own email security system flagged the message as a high-confidence phishing attempt and quarantined it, so it never reached the inbox; fifteen other vendors' quotations arrived and award went to Brann on 11 August. GAO held it is the vendor's responsibility to see that an electronically submitted quotation is actually received at the designated address, citing RFO 52.212-1(c)(1) — the deviation provision rather than the codified FAR clause — and found no systemic failure in the agency's mail filtering and no deliberate or conscious effort to keep Casey out of the competition. Decided 14 October 2026; posted by GAO 16 October 2026.
Receipt is measured at the contracting officer's inbox, not at your gateway, so the outcome here is defensible — but it was defensible because of three things in the record, and all three are yours to build. GAO leaned on the fact that every other quotation reached the contracting officer, that the contracting officer did not know about the quarantined messages, and that nobody acted to steer the award. So when a quotation turns out to have gone missing at closing, date what you received, what you were told and when, and say plainly what you did not know; if you learn of a quarantine before award you still have the choice to release the message, and learning of it afterwards is how you end up defending this protest. The second half of this one is the citation. GAO decided it under RFO 52.212-1, because Interior is running a class deviation for part 12, so the provision that governs your late-submission determination may not be the paragraph printed in the codified FAR. Check which text your solicitation actually incorporated before you quote one at a disappointed vendor.
GAO, B-424785 →Where every FAR part stands →
16 Oct 2026GAO evaluationGAO denied in part and dismissed in part Coulson Aviation (USA) Inc.'s protest of Forest Service task orders for exclusive-use airtanker services under task order request for proposals FS-AT23-EU-02, competed among holders of a 2023 multiple-award task order contract; orders went to four firms on 7 June 2026, and Coulson received one for its B-737 but none for its C-130. Coulson argued the agency had ignored an October 2025 Forest Service letter praising its safety improvements, and GAO found no basis to question that, because Coulson neither included nor referenced the letter in its proposal — an agency is not generally responsible for evaluating information that is not in the proposal. The agency conceded it had miscalculated Coulson's fuel burn rate and corrected it, but GAO denied that ground for want of competitive prejudice, the corrected figures still leaving Coulson's C-130 substantially higher in both cost per gallon and total price; it dismissed Coulson's attack on another awardee's equipment for failure to state a legally sufficient basis, the allegation being speculation unsupported by evidence. Jurisdiction over the orders rested on 41 U.S.C. § 4106(f)(1)(B), the orders exceeding $10 million. Decided 28 September 2026; posted by GAO 16 October 2026.
Evaluators read proposals, not agency files, and that cuts both ways on your source selection. Say it in the instructions to offerors, so an incumbent does not assume the commendation letters and favorable correspondence already in your shop are part of its proposal; then hold your own evaluators to the same line, because importing a document the proposal never cited is the version of this error that gets an evaluation sustained against you. On the arithmetic: an error you find after proposals are in is not what loses a protest — unaddressed prejudice is. Correct the number, re-run the comparison, and put in the file what the corrected figure does to the ranking, with the margin stated. A miscalculation corrected and documented when you find it will not sustain a protest; the same miscalculation corrected for the first time in your agency report is a different document altogether.
GAO, B-424598, B-424598.2 →
13 Oct 2026GAO evaluationGAO denied protests by Secise, LLC and Don Selvy Enterprises, Inc. of a Navy award to Elzly Technology Corporation of a roughly $64 million cost-plus-fixed-fee task order under RFP N0016725R3008, a small business set-aside issued to SeaPort NxG holders for corrosion control assistance team subject matter experts at Naval Surface Warfare Center. The Navy had first awarded to Secise in January 2026, took corrective action after two protests, held discussions with a competitive range of three and awarded to Elzly in May 2026. GAO held the agency reasonably credited Elzly with a positive CPARS rating earned on the incumbent contract by a firm that was a subcontractor rather than the prime, because that firm had performed a large share of the incumbent work and was slated for most of the follow-on hours; and it said in a footnote that an agency's obligation to consider information too close at hand is limited to information about past performance rather than information about a firm's technical proposal, so the technical adviser who knew of employee-relations concerns and took no part in the past performance evaluation created no error. The remaining grounds, including a challenge to the awardee's cost revision during discussions, were denied for want of competitive prejudice. Decided 9 September 2026; posted by GAO 13 October 2026.
Two things to carry to your next past performance evaluation. First, a subcontractor's record can carry the prime's confidence rating, but write down the pairing that makes it reasonable: the share of the predecessor work that firm actually performed, and the share of the new effort it is proposed for. That pairing is what GAO tested, not the fact that somebody on the team had a good CPARS. Second, do not let too close at hand grow into a duty to go looking outside the proposal for what a firm can technically do. If an adviser, a COR or a program engineer holds an unflattering view of an offeror's technical approach, that is not information you are obliged to hunt down and fold in, and folding it in is more likely to be the error than leaving it out — keep the person who holds it off the evaluation panel and record that you did, which is what carried the Navy here.
GAO, B-424214.3 et al. →
13 Oct 2026GAO jurisdictionGAO denied Cashel Strategic, LLC's request to reconsider the dismissal of its protest of an Air Force award to Centinel Public Partnerships, LLC of a 50-year lease of on-base lodging facilities under RFP AFCOBL-25-0001. Cashel had alleged that a third-party advisory firm tried to steer the award to Centinel, and argued on reconsideration that it should not have to show it was next in line when the evaluation results were themselves tainted. GAO held the record confirmed Cashel was not an interested party: it was ranked fifth of five with three intervening offerors, and it never showed that its proposal met most of the criteria on which it was rated unacceptable, so it could not show the substantial chance of award that competitive prejudice requires. A reasonable possibility that neutral evaluators might have scored it differently is not enough, GAO said; a protester has to show how its proposal was actually misevaluated. Decided 9 October 2026; posted by GAO 13 October 2026.
Standing is the first thing to brief in your response to a protest from a low-ranked offeror, conflict allegation and all. Where the protester sits several places down and carries unacceptable ratings it has not attacked on the merits, the prejudice question can end the protest before anyone examines the conflict — so set out the ranking, the intervening offerors and the unchallenged ratings in the agency report rather than leading with the merits of the conflict. The other half is yours to manage whatever GAO does. A dismissal on interested-party grounds is not a finding that the advisory firm did nothing wrong; that allegation was never reached. If a non-government adviser sits anywhere near your source selection, the conflict is still your problem, and the fact that no protester had standing to raise it this time is not a reason to leave the question in the file unanswered.
GAO, B-424245.3 →
Every item links its primary source. Figures and paragraph numbers are as of the issue date; check the current text before one goes in a file. Found an error? Tell us.