The Government Accountability Office's annual bid protest report for fiscal year 2025 shows that protest filing volume fell to 1,688 cases — a 6 percent decline from the 1,803 cases filed in FY2024 and the lowest total since FY2022, when filings reached 1,658. The report to Congress, published December 12, 2025, documents a sustained downward trend in protest activity from the decade's peak of approximately 2,789 cases in FY2016, representing a roughly 40 percent cumulative decline over nine years driven by structural changes in how DoD acquires goods and services.
Filing Volume Trends and Historical Context
The FY2025 total of 1,688 follows a pattern of significant year-to-year variation that makes simple trend lines misleading. FY2023 saw an anomalous spike to 2,025 cases, driven largely by mass challenges to the CIO-SP4 government-wide acquisition contract that generated hundreds of related protest filings from firms that lost a position on the vehicle. Excluding that one-time event, the underlying trend in protest volume has been consistently downward since the FY2016 peak. FY2025 sits near the bottom of the recent range, above only FY2022's 1,658 cases.
The DoD share of protest filings has declined faster than the overall market. Over the past decade, DoD-related protests have fallen approximately 48 percent while overall filings declined roughly 32 percent, meaning DoD's share of the docket has contracted from more than 50 percent in FY2018 to approximately 44 percent in FY2024. Multiple statutory changes to debriefing quality requirements for DoD contracts have reduced the information asymmetry that previously gave losing offerors incomplete grounds for challenging evaluation decisions, and the expansion of Other Transaction Agreements has moved a growing share of defense procurement dollars outside GAO's bid protest jurisdiction entirely.
Sustain Rate, Effectiveness, and Merit Decisions
GAO sustained 53 protests in FY2025, representing a 14 percent sustain rate among the 380 cases that reached a decision on the merits. The sustain rate is consistent with the prior year's 16 percent and with the multi-year average of approximately 17 percent, reflecting that the proportion of protests with merit has remained relatively stable even as filing volume has declined. The absolute number of sustains — 53 — is the lowest in over two decades, a direct consequence of the declining number of cases that reach a merits decision; 380 merit decisions is itself a multi-year low, continuing a trend seen in FY2024.
GAO's effectiveness rate, which measures the percentage of cases in which the protester obtained some form of relief including voluntary agency corrective action taken before a decision, held at 52 percent — unchanged from FY2024 and above the 10-year average of approximately 48.5 percent. The stability of this rate is analytically significant: despite the decline in total filings, protesters who pursue cases to the point of receiving substantive attention from GAO continue to obtain relief at roughly even odds. The effectiveness rate reflects GAO sustains plus cases where agencies take corrective action in response to a filed protest before GAO issues a decision, which occurs frequently when the agency reviews its evaluation record in the litigation context and concludes that its evaluation was inconsistent with the solicitation criteria or otherwise legally deficient.
Only approximately 22 to 23 percent of filed protests reach a merit decision at all. The remainder are dismissed as untimely, withdrawn by the protester, or resolved through agency corrective action before a decision is issued. This ratio has been consistent for several years and reflects both the filtering function of GAO's merits stage and the incentive the automatic stay creates for agencies to take corrective action rather than defend the award through the full protest period.
Structural Factors Driving the Decline
Five structural explanations account for the sustained decline. Enhanced debriefing requirements for DoD contracts, implemented through statutory changes in recent NDAAs, have improved the quality of information provided to losing offerors after contract award. Better debriefings allow contractors to understand the evaluation more clearly, which both helps meritorious protesters construct specific grounds for challenge and discourages protests where the evaluation rationale is transparent and defensible on the record.
The expansion of OTAs has moved a growing share of defense procurement dollars outside GAO's jurisdiction. OTAs are not subject to CICA, and losing OTA competitors have no administrative protest forum at GAO — they must either accept the result or pursue litigation at the Court of Federal Claims. As DoD has increased OTA use for AI, space, cybersecurity, and advanced manufacturing programs, the addressable market for GAO protest jurisdiction has shrunk accordingly. The Electronic Protest Docketing System, which introduced filing procedures that created friction for exploratory filings, has also contributed to a reduction in protests filed primarily to obtain the agency record rather than to pursue a substantive challenge under the new credible allegations pleading standard GAO adopted in FY2025.
Court of Federal Claims as an Emerging Alternative Forum
While GAO filings have declined, the Court of Federal Claims has seen a sharp and sustained increase in bid protest activity. COFC cases rose from 123 in FY2022 to 169 in FY2023 and 266 in FY2024 — a 116 percent increase over two years. The court offers injunctive relief that is judicially enforceable without agency discretion and broader discovery than the GAO process, making it increasingly attractive for high-value protest cases where the plaintiff is willing to invest in litigation rather than the faster but more constrained GAO administrative process.
The divergence between declining GAO filings and rising COFC cases suggests that protest activity is shifting forum rather than disappearing from the procurement landscape. GAO and the COFC measure different populations: GAO's docket is dominated by mid-market protests across a broad range of contract sizes, while COFC has disproportionately attracted the highest-dollar challenges where the cost of court litigation is justified by the contract value at stake. The two trends together suggest a bifurcation of the protest market, with large-dollar challenges increasingly routed to the court and a leaner, more selective GAO docket of mid-tier cases that meet the new credible allegations threshold.
