A federal judge has frozen an Army Corps of Engineers construction contract covering U.S. military facilities in Kuwait, ruling that the agency secretly graded a bidder's low prices as a liability instead of an advantage. Judge Stephen S. Schwartz of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims sided with MVL USA Inc., which had challenged the Mobile District's award of Solicitation No. W5J9JE25R0003 to Al Ghanim Combined Group Co. Gen. Trad. & Cont. WLL, known as AGCO.
The contract is a job-order IDIQ for construction, maintenance and related services at U.S. facilities in Kuwait — the kind of recurring task-order vehicle that keeps a base running day to day. MVL raised more than a dozen objections to how the Army Corps picked AGCO over it, but the court found only one persuasive: the agency ran a "realism" review of MVL's pricing after telling every offeror that only a "reasonableness" check would apply.
That distinction is not academic. Under a firm-fixed-price solicitation, a reasonableness review asks whether a bidder's price is too high for the government to pay. A realism review goes further, asking whether a bidder's price is too low to be credible — and it changes how low pricing gets scored. The solicitation for W5J9JE25R0003 promised offerors only the first kind of check. The record showed the Army Corps ran the second kind anyway, without telling anyone the rules had changed.
Why an Undisclosed Price Test Sank the Award
Federal procurement law has a settled rule that agencies cannot evaluate proposals against criteria offerors were never told about. Schwartz found that is exactly what happened here: the Mobile District's price analyst and its source selection authority treated MVL's lower coefficients — the pricing factors used to calculate task-order costs across the IDIQ — as a red flag rather than a strength.
"I conclude that the Agency erred, and prejudiced MVL, by basing its decision on an improper price realism analysis," Schwartz wrote in the opinion, which was originally filed under seal on July 30, 2026, and publicly reissued Sept. 22 after the parties resolved disputes over what could be unredacted.
The court's read of the administrative record showed the source selection authority explicitly framing MVL's price advantage as a downside. "[W]hile MVL does provide lower proposed coefficients than AGCO, there is significant pricing risk associated with those lower coefficients," the official wrote, in language the court quoted directly from the record. Schwartz found that reasoning turned what should have been a point in MVL's favor into the reason it lost — and that the flip only happened because the agency applied a standard it never disclosed.
Schwartz was not persuaded by the rest of MVL's case. Of the more than dozen issues MVL raised in its protest, the opinion treated all but the price-realism claim as forfeited or unpersuasive, granting judgment on the administrative record on that single ground while denying the cross-motions filed by the government and by AGCO as intervenor.
What the Injunction Blocks — and What Keeps Moving
Rather than simply vacating the award, Schwartz remanded the case to the Army Corps for 60 days, giving the agency three paths: re-evaluate the proposals under a lawful standard, cancel the solicitation, or restart the procurement. Until that process runs its course, the court barred the agency from issuing new work under the contract with one carve-out.
"The Agency is ENJOINED from awarding non-urgent task orders until further order of the Court or a joint stipulation of dismissal is filed, whichever comes first," Schwartz's order states. Task orders genuinely needed to protect the health, safety or operational readiness of U.S. forces in Kuwait can still go forward — but only if the Army Corps gives MVL 24 hours' notice before issuing them, a mechanism that lets MVL object in real time if it believes an "urgent" designation is being used to route around the injunction.
The broader order reflects how far the court was willing to go on a single sustained ground. "The case is REMANDED for further proceedings. The government is ENJOINED from actions inconsistent with this Opinion," Schwartz wrote, closing the door on any argument that the agency could simply proceed with AGCO's performance while litigation continued in the background.
What It Means for Contractors
The opinion is a reminder that firm-fixed-price solicitations carry a specific promise: offerors will be judged on whether their price is reasonable, not on whether the government's evaluators personally believe it is achievable. An agency that wants to test the credibility of low prices has to say so in the solicitation. When it doesn't, and then treats a lower bid as evidence of "risk" in the source selection decision, it has effectively applied an unstated evaluation factor — and the Court of Federal Claims has now made clear it will unwind an award over exactly that pattern.
For contractors bidding job-order and IDIQ work overseas, the case is a specific caution: coefficient and unit-price proposals are especially exposed to this kind of informal realism creep, because evaluators comparing task-order pricing across bidders can slip from "is this price reasonable" into "can this bidder actually deliver at this price" without ever amending the solicitation to say so. Offerors who see debrief language describing their pricing as risky, rather than simply high or low relative to competitors, now have a concrete precedent describing what that language can mean — and a roadmap for challenging it if the solicitation never disclosed a realism test.
The remand also matters operationally. Work under the Kuwait IDIQ does not stop entirely; urgent, readiness-related task orders can still be issued with 24 hours' notice to MVL. But routine work is frozen for up to 60 days while the Army Corps decides whether to fix its evaluation, cancel the solicitation outright, or start over — a decision that will determine whether AGCO's award survives in any form or whether the competition effectively resets.
