The U.S. Court of Federal Claims has upheld the Army's decision to redo its evaluation of a support services contract competition using an updated System for Award Management (SAM) registration clause, rejecting a challenge from the ousted incumbent that the move was engineered to save the standing awardee's eligibility after a two-day lapse in its SAM.gov registration. In an Opinion and Order reissued July 27, 2026, Senior Judge Loren A. Smith granted judgment on the administrative record to both the Army and defendant-intervenor Defense Testing & Evaluation Support Services JV, LLC (DTESS), finding no clear and convincing evidence that the service acted in bad faith when it rewrote the solicitation's registration clause during corrective action.
Background
The dispute traces back to Army Solicitation No. W91151-23-R-0024, issued in January 2023. The Army first awarded the resulting contract, No. W91151-25-D-001, to Mitchell Consulting Services Group Inc. on October 7, 2024. DTESS, the losing bidder, protested to the Government Accountability Office a week later. GAO dismissed the protest after the Army agreed to take corrective action rather than defend the award.
The Army then reopened discussions with offerors, issued additional amendments to the solicitation, and re-evaluated proposals. On January 13, 2026, the Army awarded the contract to DTESS instead of Mitchell. Mitchell sued at the Court of Federal Claims on February 4, 2026, arguing that DTESS should never have been eligible for the award because of a gap in its SAM.gov registration.
While that suit was pending, the Army's contracting officer, Dr. Traci Leonard, notified the parties in March 2026 that the service would take a second round of corrective action: terminating DTESS's newly awarded contract, issuing a bridge contract to prevent a service gap, amending the solicitation to add the current version of FAR 52.204-7 — which Leonard attributed to an earlier administrative oversight — revalidating the SAM.gov registrations of all offerors still in the competitive range, reconfirming key personnel availability, and issuing a new award decision. Mitchell amended its complaint to challenge that second corrective action directly.
Key Details
Mitchell's theory centered on a gap in DTESS's SAM registration. According to the record, DTESS's SAM.gov registration lapsed for roughly 48 hours, from June 22 to June 24, 2025, while the company updated its banking information. Under the older version of FAR 52.204-7, dated October 2018, contractors were required to remain continuously and actively registered in SAM.gov from the time they submitted an offer through final payment on the contract — a standard GAO and this court have read as covering the entirety of the preaward process. A lapse of that kind, under the old clause, would have made DTESS ineligible.
But it was that second corrective action that added the newer version of FAR 52.204-7 — dated November 2024 and finalized in August 2025 — to the solicitation. The revised clause dropped the continuous-registration requirement, instead requiring only that an offeror be registered in SAM.gov at the time it submits an offer and at the time of contract award. Because DTESS was registered when it submitted its initial proposal and again at contract award, the court held that the June 2025 deactivation was legally irrelevant under the newer clause, regardless of whether it technically was a lapse. That clause swap mooted the core of Mitchell's disqualification argument.
Mitchell argued the Army had tailored its second corrective action to preserve DTESS's eligibility after the registration lapse came to light — though Mitchell explicitly disclaimed alleging bad faith. DTESS countered that Mitchell's protest amounted to a bad-faith claim in substance, and the court evaluated it under that framework. The court applied the strong presumption that government officials act in good faith, which can only be overcome by evidence that is "clear and convincing" or "well-nigh irrefragable." Judge Smith found Mitchell had not cleared that bar, concluding the record showed a legitimate corrective-action process rather than an effort to engineer a predetermined outcome for DTESS.
The court granted the Army's and DTESS's cross-motions for judgment on the administrative record, denied Mitchell's competing motion, and declined to award Mitchell any injunctive relief. The Clerk of the Court was ordered to enter judgment in favor of the Army and DTESS. Under the corrective action the court upheld, the Army must still revalidate competitive-range offerors' SAM registrations and key personnel before issuing a new award decision. Mitchell was represented by Polsinelli PC; DTESS by Crowell & Moring LLP; and the government by the Department of Justice's Civil Division, Commercial Litigation Branch, with counsel from the Army Legal Services Agency and the 418th Contracting Support Brigade in Fort Worth, Texas.
What It Means for Contractors
The ruling underscores that FAR clause versions matter as much as the underlying facts in a bid protest, and that they can matter even after an award already looks final. DTESS's SAM.gov deactivation would have been fatal under the pre-2024 version of FAR 52.204-7 if treated as a lapse, but the newer clause language — registration required only at time of offer and time of award — changed the legal analysis entirely, even though the Army added it only after Mitchell's suit put the registration gap at issue. Contractors bidding on federal work should track which version of FAR 52.204-7 governs a given solicitation, particularly on procurements that have gone through corrective action and amendment cycles, since agencies can and do update boilerplate clauses along the way.
The decision also illustrates how difficult it remains to win a bad-faith challenge to an agency's corrective action. Losing incumbents who suspect an agency tailored a re-competition to favor a particular offeror face a demanding evidentiary standard at the Court of Federal Claims. Absent direct evidence of intent to disadvantage a specific bidder, courts will generally defer to an agency's stated rationale for revising solicitation terms, even when the revision happens to resolve an eligibility problem for the eventual awardee.
Finally, the case is a reminder that a corrective action can reopen an award that already looked final. DTESS's original January 2026 award was terminated as part of the very corrective action the court just upheld, and the Army must still revalidate SAM.gov registrations and key personnel across the competitive range before issuing a new award decision. Companies updating banking or other registration details in SAM.gov should minimize downtime and document the timeline carefully, since a registration gap can still create legal exposure under solicitations that retain the older, continuous-registration version of FAR 52.204-7.
