GAO sustained protests filed by Amentum Technology Inc. and SOS International LLC against the Defense Intelligence Agency's award of a contract to General Dynamics Information Technology, Inc., in B-4238989 et al., decided January 27, 2026. The contract supported USCENTCOM Intelligence Directorate operations in consolidated intelligence analysis. GAO found that DIA committed two separate but equally fundamental evaluation errors: it applied disparate evaluation standards by assigning GDIT a strength on a training factor while marking Amentum with a weakness despite Amentum's offering being described as having "far more detail" and being "more rigorous" than GDIT's approach; and it assigned SOSi a weakness based on statements referencing "legacy networks decommissioned over 8 years" that appeared nowhere in SOSi's written proposal or oral presentation recordings. The decision required DIA to undertake corrective action.
The Unequal Treatment Finding: Amentum vs. GDIT
Unequal treatment is one of the most consistently sustained protest grounds at GAO. The legal standard is well-established: an agency must evaluate all offerors under the same evaluation criteria, applying the same standards to comparable proposal content. Where two offerors address the same factor with materially similar approaches and one receives a strength while the other receives a neutral rating or a weakness, the evaluation record must contain a documented, rational basis for the differentiation. In the DIA USCENTCOM contract evaluation, the record revealed no such rational basis. Amentum's training discussion was assessed by the government evaluators themselves as being more detailed and rigorous than GDIT's, yet GDIT received the favorable rating. GAO found this inversion of the evaluation criteria to be arbitrary and unsupported by the record, a finding that goes to the heart of the competitive integrity of the source selection process.
GAO rejected DIA's argument that unequal treatment requires identical proposal language between competing offerors — a position that would effectively make the unequal treatment doctrine unenforceable in any competition where offerors present their approaches in different formats or with different levels of specificity. The panel confirmed that the standard is evenhandedness, not word-for-word identity: if one offeror's more-detailed approach to a criterion receives a lesser rating than a competitor's less-detailed approach, the evaluators owe a coherent explanation for why greater detail was rated lower, and "we preferred the other approach" is not sufficient justification when the evaluation criteria reward detail.
The Phantom Weakness: SOSi and the Statements That Weren't There
The SOSi finding was, if anything, more alarming from a procurement integrity standpoint. DIA assigned SOSi a weakness citing references to "legacy networks decommissioned over 8 years" — networks that the evaluators apparently believed SOSi was proposing to rely on. When GAO reviewed SOSi's written proposal and the recordings of SOSi's oral presentation, it found no reference to these legacy networks anywhere. The weakness was based entirely on a characterization that the agency evaluators attributed to SOSi but that SOSi had never actually made. GAO has described this type of evaluation error — where a weakness is grounded in a misreading or fabrication of what the offeror actually proposed — as one of the clearest grounds for sustaining a protest, because it means the evaluation was not based on the proposals as submitted but on something else entirely.
DIA's defense — that its evaluators had a reasonable basis for drawing the inference — did not withstand GAO's document review. The inference was not reasonable because the source documents simply did not support it. This case illustrates why protest investigations that allow GAO to review source evaluation documents are essential: evaluation narratives are summarizations of the record, and when the underlying record contradicts the narrative, the narrative does not survive scrutiny.
What It Means for Contractors
The B-4238989 decision provides a practical template for identifying and documenting unequal treatment and phantom weakness protest grounds.
- After receiving a debriefing, specifically compare your weakness descriptions with whatever information you can obtain — through the debriefing, FOIA, or protest discovery — about how the awardee was evaluated on the same factors. If the awardee received a strength on a factor where your approach was more detailed or technically superior by the evaluation criteria's own terms, document the comparison before the protest filing deadline.
- Review every weakness in your evaluation for accuracy against your actual proposal. If a weakness cites a statement, approach, or concern that you did not raise in your proposal, that is grounds for a protest based on an inaccurate evaluation record — one of the clearest and most defensible protest grounds available.
- Request and review the Source Selection Evaluation Board's narrative summaries of your proposal and the awardee's proposal as part of an enhanced debriefing request under the DFARS enhanced debriefing rule; the narrative summaries often reveal evaluation inconsistencies that the final debriefing presentation does not fully capture.
- The corrective action DIA must undertake — a re-evaluation of the competing proposals under consistent standards — may result in a new award decision; firms that were affected by the DIA USCENTCOM competition should monitor the corrective action and be prepared to respond if the re-evaluation process results in a second selection decision that is itself subject to protest.
Corrective Action and What Comes Next for the DIA Competition
When GAO sustains a protest and orders corrective action, the agency has substantial discretion in structuring the corrective measure — GAO recommends an action but does not mandate the specific form. In cases involving evaluation errors as fundamental as those found in B-4238989, agencies typically choose between re-evaluating the written proposals already submitted, requesting revised proposals from the competitive range, or in the most serious cases canceling the solicitation and starting the procurement over. DIA's decision will likely depend on how pervasive the evaluation errors were: if the phantom weakness assigned to SOSi and the unequal treatment of Amentum are isolated to specific evaluation board members and specific subfactors, a targeted re-evaluation of the affected portions of the record may be sufficient. If the problems reflect systemic weaknesses in how the Source Selection Evaluation Board structured its evaluation process, DIA may conclude that only a fresh source selection evaluation can produce a defensible record. Contractors affected by the DIA USCENTCOM competition — particularly Amentum and SOSi — should engage counsel to monitor the corrective action closely and preserve protest rights against the re-evaluation outcome, because a second source selection decision that repeats the same evaluation approach is itself subject to protest on a compressed timeline.