The Government Accountability Office denied a protest by Hudson Technologies Company on July 7, 2026, upholding the Defense Logistics Agency's award of a hydrofluorocarbon gas contract to RGAS LLC of Houston, Texas, and closing out a challenge from the supplier that had held DLA's refrigerant work since 2016. The decision turned on a simple question: when a solicitation buys gas that arrives in cylinders, what is the end product?

Background

Hudson Technologies (NASDAQ: HDSN), headquartered in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, is among the largest refrigerant reclaimers in the United States, and it had been DLA's prime refrigerant contractor since a five-year award in July 2016, renewed for five more years in 2021. In October 2025, the company announced it had won the follow-on award. That win did not survive contact with the protest system. A competitor filed a bid protest at the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, and in January 2026 DLA rescinded Hudson's award while it reviewed its own evaluation methodology.

Hudson played the setback down. President and CEO Kenneth Gaglione said in January 2026 that "bid protests are a common occurrence in government contracting matters, and we are confident that Hudson is in the best position to ultimately receive this contract." Hudson's existing DLA contract was later extended, pushing its expiration from July 29 to Nov. 29, 2026, with options for two further three-month extensions, while the rebid played out.

DLA reran the competition under RFP No. SPE4A7-25-R-0788 and awarded to RGAS. Hudson protested on April 6, 2026, drawing GAO attorney Kenneth Kilgour and a July 15 due date. The decision landed eight days early, and it went against the incumbent on both grounds.

Key Details

Hudson's headline argument was a Buy American Act challenge, and on its face it looked like the kind of allegation that gets agencies in trouble. The RFP incorporated DFARS provision 252.225-7000, under which RGAS certified that it would supply a domestic end product. Hudson asserted that RGAS's claims were "directly contradicted by statements from RGAS's supplier confirming that RGAS purchased cylinders from a company based in Thailand." If the agency knew, or should have known, that a piece of what it was buying came from Thailand, Hudson argued, DLA could not reasonably lean on the certification.

GAO never reached the reasonableness question, because it disagreed about what was being bought. "Because the end product at issue in this procurement is HFC gases--not the cylinders," the decision states, "the protester's allegation that the agency was on notice that the awardee would supply foreign-made cylinders for the HFC gases and unreasonably relied on a certification that the cylinders would comply with the BAA fails to assert or establish a claim of improper agency action." The cylinders were containers, not the deliverable. Their origin therefore could not put DLA on notice of anything relevant to the certification RGAS actually made.

That definitional move did most of the work. GAO then restated the rule that follows: where a contracting officer has no information prior to award indicating that the product to be furnished is not a domestic end product, the officer may properly rely on an offeror's self-certification. Certification is a representation the offeror makes at its own risk; contracting officers need not audit it on a competitor's say-so.

Hudson's second ground attacked the past-performance evaluation. The company argued that DLA conducted no substantive review of the information it pulled from the Supplier Performance Risk System, relying on RGAS's total supplier risk score alone rather than digging into the components behind it. An aggregate number, Hudson argued, cannot substitute for actual judgment about whether an offeror can perform.

GAO denied that ground on the text of the solicitation, noting that the RFP "does not specify how DLA would use SPRS, just that it would be used to evaluate past performance." Where a solicitation names the evaluation tool and stops there, an agency that uses the named tool as written has done what it promised, and a protester's disagreement with the agency's reliance on the overall score does not establish that the evaluation was unreasonable.

What It Means for Contractors

The end-product ruling is the piece worth carrying forward. Buy American analysis attaches to the end product the solicitation identifies, not to everything that arrives on the truck. A protester who wants to attack a domestic certification has to tie the foreign content to the item being procured. Pointing at packaging, containers, or ancillary hardware invites exactly the response Hudson got — that the allegation does not state a claim of improper agency action at all, regardless of how well documented the foreign sourcing is. Hudson appears to have had sourcing evidence, including what it characterized as statements from RGAS's own supplier. The facts were about the wrong object.

For offerors on the winning side, the corollary is a reminder about scope, not a license. GAO's holding addresses what DLA had to notice during evaluation, not what a contractor may certify. Certifications remain enforceable representations, and an agency's ability to rely on one during source selection is not the same as immunity from consequences if the certification proves false during performance. The protest forum simply is not where a competitor gets to litigate a supply chain that sits outside the defined end product.

The past-performance holding carries a narrower but recurring lesson: read the evaluation section literally, and challenge the solicitation before proposals are due if the method is too thin. Hudson's complaint was, in substance, that a single SPRS score is a weak basis for judging performance risk on a commodity contract of this size. That may be a defensible policy critique. It was not a winning protest ground when the RFP said SPRS would be used and said nothing about how. As a general matter, objections to an evaluation methodology are solicitation challenges, and under GAO's timeliness rules those expire once the proposal deadline passes. Offerors who see an evaluation scheme that will not distinguish them from a newcomer need to raise it while the terms are still in play.

The broader picture is an object lesson in incumbency risk. Hudson held the work for roughly a decade, won the follow-on, then watched a Court of Federal Claims protest by a competitor push DLA to rescind the award and revisit its own methodology — a reset that produced a rebid Hudson did not win. Its remaining position rests on the contract extension rather than the follow-on it announced in October 2025. Ten years of performance history did not survive a procedural do-over, and the July 7 denial removes Hudson's route back through the GAO protest system.

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