Castro & Company will collect its proposal and protest costs from the Department of Transportation, but it will not get the internal controls work it competed for. In decision B-424145.2, dated Nov. 9, 2026, the Government Accountability Office sustained the Alexandria, Virginia, small business's protest of a call order the department's Office of the Secretary placed with Guidehouse, Inc. GAO found that the agency marked down Castro's proposal on grounds the solicitation did not support, then built its best-value tradeoff on those findings.
The outcome shows how much a sustained protest is worth once the work has moved on. Guidehouse has already performed the original period of performance, and the department extended the order through Mar. 25, 2027, so GAO concluded that disturbing the award was not practicable. The recommended remedy is money, not the contract.
How the DOT Internal Controls Call Order Was Competed
The Office of the Secretary issued request for proposals No. WC2025M70WCSK0003 on July 25, 2025, seeking internal controls services. The agency ran the competition under FAR subpart 8.4 and sent the solicitation to the four holders of a Federal Railroad Administration multiple-award blanket purchase agreement, so the work went out as a call order against that BPA rather than as a standalone contract.
Castro proposed a total price of $649,400. Guidehouse proposed $723,086, a difference of $73,686. Despite the price gap, the agency issued the initial call order to Guidehouse on Sept. 26, 2025. Castro protested, and GAO dismissed that protest as academic after the agency said it would reevaluate proposals and make a new source selection decision. The department reaffirmed the award to Guidehouse, and Castro filed the protest GAO decided this week. GAO's recent bid protest decisions listing posted the case on Nov. 10 with the outcome "We sustain the protest."
The decision's digest frames the core problem: the protest is sustained "where the agency's negative findings are not supported by the solicitation's evaluation criteria or the contents of the protester's proposal." Two of those findings drove the result.
Why GAO Rejected the Surge-Staff Resume Finding
The agency faulted Castro for not supplying resumes for the surge staff it planned to deploy. GAO found that criticism unreasonable. The solicitation asked offerors to identify their own key personnel and provide resumes for them, and Castro identified three key personnel and included their resumes.
The decision notes that "Castro did not identify any surge resources as key personnel in its proposal," and that "the solicitation did not require offerors to identify individuals or provide resumes for non-key personnel." Reading the solicitation to require resumes for everyone needed to perform the work would, GAO said, in effect make almost all contract personnel key personnel, a requirement no reasonable offeror could anticipate. An evaluator who wants named surge staff has to ask for them in the solicitation.
The finding matters because surge capacity is a common feature of services competitions. Offerors often describe a bench of qualified staff they can call on without committing specific people to it. Under this decision, an agency that wants more than that has to put the requirement in writing.
The Single Fixed-Price Dispute
The second flaw concerned price. The agency concluded that Castro had not submitted a single complete price. GAO disagreed after reviewing Castro's price volume, which stated a total firm fixed price, included the completed price table, and added breakdowns by task and by fiscal year.
GAO put it plainly: "Castro's price proposal clearly met the minimum solicitation requirements," and the agency's contrary finding was unreasonable. A firm-fixed-price proposal can carry detail at the task level without losing its status as a single fixed price, and the agency's reading of Castro's submission did not hold up.
The price finding carries extra weight because Castro was the lower-priced offeror, at $649,400 against Guidehouse's $723,086. When an agency selects a higher-priced proposal, the tradeoff record has to explain why the extra cost buys something of value. Here the agency had justified the premium partly by pointing to concerns about Castro that GAO found unsupported.
A Flawed Tradeoff and Competitive Prejudice
Because the best-value tradeoff relied on evaluations GAO found unreasonable, GAO concluded the tradeoff itself was flawed. The agency had rated Castro's proposal "some" confidence overall against "high" for Guidehouse, and it specifically relied on the missing surge resumes as a basis to select Guidehouse despite its higher price.
GAO sustains a protest only when the protester shows competitive prejudice. Where the record gives no basis to know what the outcome would have been without the errors, GAO resolves doubts about prejudice in the protester's favor, because a reasonable possibility of prejudice is enough. The solicitation allowed an award to other than the lowest-priced offeror, but GAO could not conclude that the agency would have made the same tradeoff without its evaluation errors.
Why Castro Gets Costs Instead of the Work
GAO's usual recommendation in a sustained protest is corrective action, such as a new evaluation or a new award decision. Here, GAO concluded that disturbing the award was not practicable. Guidehouse had already performed the original period from Sept. 26, 2025 to Sept. 25, 2026, and the department and Guidehouse executed a six-month extension on Aug. 12, 2026 that runs through Mar. 25, 2027. The agency told GAO that interrupting Guidehouse's work would irreparably harm its statutorily required assessments and reporting.
The decision records that Castro objected to that extension, arguing that a shorter period would have been enough. GAO nonetheless declined to recommend that the department unwind the order. Instead, GAO recommended that the department reimburse Castro for the costs of preparing its proposal and the costs of filing and pursuing the protest. Both the agency and Castro had favored that remedy. Castro must submit its certified claim for those costs directly to the agency within 60 days of receiving the decision.
What It Means for Contractors
For offerors on BPA call orders and other FAR subpart 8.4 buys, the decision confirms that GAO holds agencies to the evaluation terms they wrote, even in streamlined competitions. Three points stand out:
- Resume requirements are what the RFP says they are. If a solicitation asks for key-personnel resumes only, an agency cannot downgrade a proposal for omitting resumes for surge or other non-key staff.
- Task-level price detail does not break a fixed price. A price table with task breakdowns can still satisfy a single fixed-price requirement, and an agency that reads it otherwise needs a reasonable basis in the record.
- Timing shapes the remedy. Once the awardee performs and the agency extends the order, a winning protester may recover only its costs. Firms that want a chance at the work itself should protest promptly and watch for performance and extensions that make disturbing the award impracticable.
Castro's 60-day window for its certified claim is now running. GAO did not recommend that the department recompete the requirement, so for Castro the sustained protest ends in cost recovery.
