The following ’is an installment in Crowell & Moring’s Bid Protest Sustain of the Month Series. In this series, Crowell’s Government Contracts Practice keeps you up to date with a summary of one of the most notable bid protest sustain decisions each month. Below, Crowell Consultant (and former GAO Bid Protest Hearing Officer) Cherie Owen discusses GAO’s April 2026 sustain decision in Owl International Inc., d/b/a Global, a 1st Flagship Company, where the Navy’s mid-procurement course correction created a new problem – one GAO was unwilling to overlook.
Under the procurement at issue, the Navy sought a contractor to provide services to manage, operate, and maintain the Navy’s emergency ship salvage material system and to support its oil and hazardous substance spill response program worldwide. The case arrived at GAO with considerable history: in an earlier protest, GAO had sustained Owl’s challenge because the Navy failed to evaluate professional employee compensation as required by FAR 52.222-46, which had been incorporated in the original RFP. After a second award selecting the other offeror, PCCI, and a second round of corrective action, the Navy took a different approach.
Rather than complete a fresh evaluation of professional compensation, the Navy instead amended the solicitation to remove FAR 52.222-46 from the RFP because the agency had concluded that the contract lacked “a meaningful amount of professional employees.” In connection with this amendment, the Navy advised that offerors would only be permitted to revise their cost/price proposals. After an unsuccessful agency-level protest, Owl challenged the Navy’s removal of FAR 52.222-46 and its limitation of proposal amendments in a pre-award protest at GAO. Owl was unsuccessful on the first challenge, but successful on the second. GAO denied Owl’s challenge to the removal of FAR 52.222-46, deferring to the Navy’s judgment that 15 professional employees out of the 249-person workforce (about 6%) did not constitute “meaningful numbers” in the context of the contract.
However, GAO sustained Owl’s challenge to the limitation on proposal revisions. The Navy argued that the removal of FAR 52.222-46 was immaterial to offerors’ technical proposals, as the considerations envisioned by that FAR provision directly impacted cost/price proposals – not offerors’ technical approaches. GAO was not persuaded. Examining the RFP’s requirements, GAO found that offerors’ technical proposals were required to address managing key and non-key personnel attrition, the approach to retaining senior engineering staff and recruiting less experienced workers, and more broadly the offeror’s approach to recruiting, retention, training, and ensuring availability of quality personnel. These areas were inextricably connected to the professional compensation criteria under FAR 52.222-46.
The removal of the FAR provision eliminated the need for offerors to focus specifically on the levels of proposed professional compensation, thereby opening up additional options for an offeror to propose a technical approach that the firm believed would make its proposal more competitive. Owl reinforced this point with a declaration identifying specific technical revisions the firm would consider making if permitted to revise its technical proposal in light of the amendment. Moreover, the RFP required that offerors’ technical proposals be consistent with their cost/price proposals — further demonstrating the interconnection between the two volumes. GAO accordingly sustained the protest on the ground that the Navy’s restriction on proposal revisions was unreasonable. In sustaining the protest, GAO recommended that the Navy request final proposal revisions without the restriction limiting revisions to the cost/price volume. The Owl International decision offers important practical guidance for government contractors navigating mid-procurement amendments. When an agency amends a solicitation but limits offerors’ ability to revise their proposals, offerors should carefully analyze whether those restrictions prevent them from fully responding to the amendment’s impact on the competition. If so, offerors should seriously consider filing a pre-award protest – and should act quickly, as pre-award protests must be filed before the closing date for receipt of proposals. GAO will scrutinize whether a limitation on revisions is truly consistent with the full scope of the amendment’s effect on the procurement. For contractors facing similar restrictions, the decision underscores the value of building a concrete, record-based case: the more specifically a contractor can demonstrate how an amendment affects its technical approach, the stronger its position at GAO.