GAO sustained protests filed by Tiger Natural Gas, Inc. against the Defense Logistics Agency in B-423744; B-423744.2; B-423744.3, ruled in December 2025 and covered by the Government Contracts Legal Forum in January 2026, finding that DLA's administrative record submission was so severely redacted that it was impossible for GAO to conduct a meaningful review of the agency's evaluation. The agency had redacted the administrative record to the point where only offeror names and overall adjectival ratings remained visible — stripping out all substantive evaluation narratives, sub-factor assessments, and comparative judgments that form the actual basis of a source selection decision. GAO held that protective orders — under which counsel for both the government and the protester are permitted to review sensitive documents without disclosing them to the public or their clients — exist precisely to address the fishing-expedition and proprietary information concerns that agencies invoke to justify redaction, and that an agency cannot use those concerns as a basis for wholesale redaction after a protective order is in place. The decision required DLA to produce a properly unredacted record.
The Purpose of the Administrative Record in Bid Protests
When a bid protest is filed at GAO, the responding agency must produce an administrative record — a compilation of all the documents that the agency relied upon in making the challenged procurement decision. This typically includes the solicitation, all amendments and questions-and-answers, all proposals submitted, the evaluation team's individual evaluator score sheets and narratives, the Source Selection Evaluation Board's consensus evaluation report, the Source Selection Authority's decision memorandum, and any supporting analyses or comparative assessments. The administrative record is the evidentiary foundation on which GAO evaluates whether the agency's decision was reasonable, consistent with the solicitation, and supported by the evidence. Without a complete and substantive record, GAO cannot determine whether the agency evaluated proposals equally, whether adjectival ratings were supported by documented findings, or whether the comparative trade-off analysis was legally sufficient.
Protective orders are a standard feature of bid protest practice at GAO. Under a protective order, designated counsel on both sides — and outside counsel to the protester — may review documents that contain proprietary competitive information or sensitive government data. The protective order prohibits them from disclosing the protected information to their clients or to the public. This mechanism is specifically designed to allow meaningful protest review while protecting the legitimate confidentiality interests of competing offerors and the government. GAO's rationale in sustaining the Tiger Natural Gas protest was straightforward: if a protective order is in place, the concerns that justify redaction — specifically, that a protester's counsel would share a competitor's pricing or technical approach with the protester — are already addressed. The agency's additional layer of wholesale redaction served no legitimate purpose and actively prevented GAO from doing its job.
What the Decision Means for Agency Record Production
The Tiger Natural Gas decision is part of a pattern in which GAO has increasingly pushed back against agencies that treat the administrative record as an opportunity to minimize disclosure rather than to facilitate meaningful protest review. Earlier decisions in this line — going back several years — established that agencies cannot redact evaluation narratives under the guise of protecting source selection confidentiality when a protective order is in place. The DLA redaction at issue in this case was particularly egregious: reducing the evaluation record to names and overall ratings effectively made it impossible to evaluate any of the specific protest grounds that Tiger Natural Gas had raised, which required analysis of how the agency assessed individual evaluation subfactors and compared competing proposals. GAO's decision to sustain — rather than simply direct the agency to produce a proper record — reflects the seriousness with which the board views obstruction of the protest review process.
What It Means for Contractors
The Tiger Natural Gas decision arms protesters with a clear precedent when agencies produce suspiciously thin administrative records and provides practical guidance for challenging improper redaction.
- Protesters who receive an administrative record that appears to have been stripped of substantive evaluation content should immediately assess whether a protective order is in place; if it is, a motion challenging the adequacy of the record — citing Tiger Natural Gas and the broader line of GAO decisions on this issue — is a strong procedural tool to force production of the properly unredacted evaluation documents.
- Government contracting officers and agency legal counsel preparing protest response packages should approach administrative record production as an obligation to enable meaningful review, not as an opportunity to limit disclosure; excessive redaction that strips substantive evaluation content will be challenged successfully and will delay protest resolution while the agency is required to produce a proper record.
- Protective orders are requested by the protester's counsel and issued by GAO at the beginning of the protest proceeding; protesters should request a protective order as a standard practice in any protest involving proprietary information, because the protective order both enables review of sensitive documents and removes the government's primary justification for excessive redaction.
- DLA energy procurement — the context for the Tiger Natural Gas protest, which appears to involve natural gas supply contracting for DoD facilities — is a substantial market with significant competition; firms in the energy supply contracting space that lose DLA competitions should engage counsel promptly after debriefing to assess whether the evaluation record, as described in the debriefing, supports a protest on evaluation or record adequacy grounds.
Administrative Record Completeness and Protester Access
The Tiger Natural Gas decision addresses a tension inherent in the bid protest system: agencies must disclose the administrative record that supported their award decision, but records often contain information that is legitimately protected as source selection sensitive, proprietary, or classified. GAO permits agencies to withhold genuinely protected information, but redactions must be applied selectively — not used to reduce the record so severely that the protester cannot assess whether the evaluation was conducted properly. When redactions prevent the protester from understanding the evaluation methodology, technical ratings, or resolution of apparent inconsistencies, GAO treats the over-redaction as a procedural violation warranting sustain and corrective action. Protesters that receive heavily redacted administrative records should challenge the redactions early in the protest proceeding rather than attempting to build a substantive protest on a record that has been stripped of its evidentiary foundation.