GAO sustained a bid protest filed by Solvere Technical Group, LLC against the Department of the Navy, Naval Surface Warfare Center in B-423785, decided December 2025 and covered by the Government Contracts Legal Forum in January 2026. GAO found that the Naval Surface Warfare Center downgraded Solvere's proposal — and those of similarly situated offerors — for using "TBD" (to be determined) designations for non-key personnel positions, even though the solicitation expressly stated that TBD was an acceptable approach for positions in that category. The decision reaffirmed one of the most consistent principles in GAO's bid protest jurisprudence: agencies must evaluate proposals against the evaluation criteria stated in the solicitation and cannot penalize offerors for approaches that the solicitation explicitly authorizes. The corrective action required NSWC to re-evaluate the affected proposals under the solicitation's actual requirements rather than the unstated standard the evaluators had applied.
Key Personnel vs. Non-Key Personnel in Government Services Contracts
Services contracts — for information technology support, professional services, program management assistance, and similar work — routinely distinguish between key personnel and non-key personnel in their staffing requirements. Key personnel are individuals whose specific qualifications, experience, or clearance are so central to the contractor's technical approach that the government wants to evaluate them as part of the proposal and to lock in the contractor's commitment to have those specific individuals perform the work. Key personnel are typically named in the proposal, their resumes are submitted for evaluation, and their replacement requires advance government approval. The commitment to specific key individuals is part of the evaluated technical approach and cannot be changed without the agency's consent.
Non-key personnel are the broader workforce that the contractor will use to perform the contract — the IT technicians, analysts, specialists, and support staff whose individual qualifications matter but who are not so uniquely essential that the government needs to evaluate them by name before award. For non-key positions, solicitations typically specify minimum qualification requirements — years of experience, education, clearance level, certifications — that all non-key personnel must meet, but they do not require the contractor to name specific individuals or commit to specific candidates before award. The TBD designation reflects the reality that a contractor competing for a contract it has not yet won cannot predict exactly which of its employees or new hires will ultimately fill non-key positions — and the solicitation's express permission to use TBD for non-key personnel acknowledges this reality.
The Evaluation Error and GAO's Analysis
The NSWC evaluators in this procurement treated TBD designations for non-key personnel as a weakness in Solvere's technical approach, apparently concluding that the use of TBD indicated insufficient planning or lack of available personnel to fill the positions. GAO's review of the solicitation found that the solicitation explicitly told offerors that TBD was acceptable for non-key personnel — a clear statement that eliminated any basis for the evaluators' adverse inference. GAO's analysis addressed NSWC's argument that the TBD evaluations reflected a reasonable assessment of the relative merits of proposals that named specific non-key personnel versus proposals that used TBD. GAO rejected this reasoning: an offeror that follows the solicitation's instructions cannot be penalized relative to an offeror that goes beyond the solicitation's requirements, because doing so creates a competitive penalty for compliance with the solicitation's plain language.
The decision also addressed the issue of prior similar procurements: NSWC had used similar solicitation language in a related procurement and interpreted TBD the same permissive way in that earlier evaluation. GAO found that this prior consistent interpretation was additional evidence that the solicitation language meant what it said, and that the deviation in the current evaluation was an aberration rather than a legitimate evolution of evaluation practice. Agencies are not bound forever by earlier interpretation of similar language, but when a prior evaluation applied the same language consistently with the plain meaning, a departure from that interpretation in a subsequent evaluation requires clear explanation and documentation — which the NSWC record did not provide.
What It Means for Contractors
The Solvere Technical Group decision provides actionable guidance for both offerors managing personnel commitments in proposals and contracting officers writing and applying personnel requirements.
- Offerors reviewing solicitations for services contracts should carefully read the distinction between key and non-key personnel requirements; if the solicitation permits TBD for non-key positions, using TBD is not only acceptable but actually protects the contractor from making commitments it cannot fulfill, and the Solvere decision confirms that this approach cannot be penalized in evaluation.
- Proposal managers should document in their own internal records the specific solicitation language that authorizes their approach to staffing — particularly for personnel-related sections where evaluator subjectivity is high — so that a protest challenge to the evaluation can be quickly grounded in the solicitation's actual text rather than requiring lengthy reconstruction of the bidder's intent.
- Contracting officers drafting personnel sections for services solicitations should be precise about which positions are key and which are non-key, and should explicitly state whether TBD is permitted for each category; ambiguous personnel language is one of the most consistent sources of evaluation-criterion protests at GAO, and clarity at the solicitation stage prevents disputes at the evaluation and protest stages.
- Offerors whose proposals received weaknesses related to personnel staffing depth, named personnel, or TBD designations should specifically request in their debriefing whether the solicitation language governing those staffing elements was applied as written; if the evaluators applied a standard not stated in the solicitation, that is a protest ground with a high likelihood of success based on the consistent line of GAO decisions in this area.
Key vs. Non-Key Personnel and Proposal Risk Evaluation
The Solvere Technical decision highlights a recurring source of evaluation error in technically complex service procurements: the treatment of personnel who are designated non-key in the solicitation but whose qualifications are nonetheless evaluated as a basis for assigning technical risk. When an agency evaluates non-key personnel qualifications, it must apply the same methodology to all offerors. If evaluators reward one offeror's experienced non-key staff with a positive finding, they must scrutinize other offerors' staffing for the same role equivalently. Applying different standards to non-key staffing descriptions is a textbook unequal treatment violation. Offerors preparing proposals for technical service contracts should review the solicitation's key and non-key personnel designations carefully and calibrate the depth of their staffing descriptions to the evaluation criteria that the solicitation actually identifies.