The Department of Homeland Security must redo its search for a third contractor on an immigration-IT recompete worth more than $425 million so far, after federal auditors found the agency cut one bidder out of the running without ever writing down why. In a decision publicly released Sept. 10, the Government Accountability Office sustained a protest by FusionEdge Solutions, LLC challenging U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services' plan to consider only a single company for a possible third task order on the agency's RIVER solicitation. GAO decided the case internally Aug. 27, and it marks the third distinct round of protest fighting over the same procurement since a rival's earlier challenge was dismissed in September 2025.
What Is RIVER, and Why Did USCIS Stop at Two Awards?
The RIVER solicitation — RFQ No. 70SBUR24Q00000106 — covers DevSecOps, operations and maintenance, and enhancement support for the IT systems that run USCIS's immigration benefits processing. The solicitation contemplated up to three task-order awards. USCIS made two: $205.8 million to BridgePhase, LLC and $219.9 million to Peregrine Digital Services, LLC. The agency then announced corrective action limiting any further consideration for a third award to a single remaining competitor, LightFeather IO, LLC — shutting out FusionEdge, which had bid $223.98 million, and Red Cedar Harmonia, LLC, which had bid $225.0 million.
Both excluded bidders protested. GAO consolidated FusionEdge's challenges under B-423829.2 and B-423829.7, and Red Cedar Harmonia's under B-423829.3 and B-423829.5, issuing companion decisions on the same day and reaching opposite outcomes for the two protesters.
GAO: DHS's 'Already Determined' Claim Has No Paper Trail
FusionEdge's core argument was that USCIS never actually decided not to give it a third award — the agency simply asserted that it had, after the fact, to justify narrowing the field to LightFeather. GAO agreed. The original source-selection decision stated only that "two awards will be made," with no finding, analysis, or record entry addressing a third. When USCIS later claimed it had already determined FusionEdge would not receive one, GAO found nothing in the file to support that claim.
"Because the bases for the agency's intended corrective action were not documented, we cannot conclude that the agency has a reasonable basis for its announced course of action," GAO wrote in the FusionEdge decision. As a remedy, GAO recommended USCIS make any future decision on a third award "reasonable and consistent with the terms of the solicitation," and it awarded FusionEdge its protest costs, including attorneys' fees.
FusionEdge did not win everything it asked for. GAO separately denied the company's challenge to its own "Some Confidence" rating on a code-challenge exercise, finding evaluators reasonably determined FusionEdge had deployed only one component to production when the requirement called for deployment across development, test, and production environments. The sustain applies narrowly to the undocumented corrective-action decision, not to FusionEdge's technical scoring.
Red Cedar Harmonia's Parallel Protest Comes Up Empty
In the companion decision, GAO denied and dismissed Red Cedar Harmonia's separate protest, which challenged both its own evaluation and the ratings given to BridgePhase and Peregrine. Red Cedar Harmonia argued the agency should have conducted a price-realism analysis of the awardees' proposals; GAO rejected that theory because the solicitation contained no clause requiring one, and an agency is not obligated to perform an analysis the terms of its own solicitation do not demand.
"A protester's disagreement with the agency's judgment, by itself, is insufficient to establish that the agency acted unreasonably," GAO wrote in the Red Cedar Harmonia decision, rejecting the company's broader attack on the evaluators' technical findings. GAO also noted that "an agency may properly take into account specific, albeit not expressly identified, matters that are logically encompassed by, or related to, the stated evaluation criteria" — meaning evaluators are not confined to a checklist reading of a solicitation's stated factors when they document their judgments.
A Recompete That Won't Stay Settled
RIVER has now drawn three separate rounds of GAO litigation in just over a year. LightFeather IO itself protested the procurement earlier, under case B-423829, and that challenge was dismissed in September 2025. LightFeather has since become the sole company USCIS wants to consider for the disputed third slot — the same slot GAO just ruled the agency cannot hand it without a documented rationale. That leaves USCIS to either build the missing record and defend a decision to favor LightFeather again, reopen consideration to FusionEdge and Red Cedar Harmonia, or decline to make a third award at all. Any of those paths likely keeps the docket open past this month's decisions.
What It Means for Contractors
The FusionEdge decision is a reminder that corrective action is not a blank check. When an agency narrows a competitive field after the fact, GAO expects a contemporaneous record showing how and why — not a post hoc assertion that the choice was already made. Contractors bidding on multi-award vehicles that leave a task order "to be determined" should treat any later narrowing of the field as protestable if the agency's file doesn't show its work, and should ask for the record early rather than assume silence means the matter was settled internally.
The result also underscores that a sustained protest doesn't require winning on every count: FusionEdge lost its technical-rating argument but still secured a full do-over of the corrective-action decision, plus recovery of its protest costs and attorneys' fees — a meaningful deterrent value even on a narrow procedural sustain, and one that agencies weighing quick, undocumented corrective action would do well to remember. For BridgePhase and Peregrine, whose awards were not challenged, day-to-day performance on the two active task orders continues unaffected; the fight is entirely about who gets the third slot. And for LightFeather IO, a company that has now been on both sides of RIVER's protest history — seeing its own 2025 protest dismissed once USCIS agreed to reconsider its awards, then benefiting from a later corrective action GAO just unwound — the outcome means USCIS has to justify its position all over again before any third award can stick.
