The U.S. Court of Federal Claims on June 15, 2026 denied motions filed by Assertive Professionals LLC and Tellus Strategies LLC challenging the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's September 2025 re-award of its $947 million CLOVER multiple-award indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract for professional services supporting the intelligence community. The ruling closes more than three years of sustained litigation and allows NGA to move forward with task-order competitions across the five remaining awardees.
All five contractors — Compass, Exacta Solutions, Innovate Now, Logic Gate, and ProCleared — retain their positions on the vehicle. The court simultaneously granted the government's and awardees' cross-motions for judgment on the agency record in both cases, delivering a clean procedural victory for NGA.
What the Court Actually Ruled
The central legal dispute turned on how NGA's evaluators assigned adjectival ratings during the re-evaluation that preceded the September 2025 re-award. The procurement employed a self-scoring methodology under which offerors claimed points that NGA later verified. The protesters argued those ratings had to be derived from mathematical calculations — a point-scoring or weighting methodology that could be audited numerically. The court rejected that argument outright.
According to the court's decision, NGA "reasonably exercised the discretion provided by the solicitation" when its evaluators applied qualitative judgment rather than formula-based scoring to assign adjectival ratings. The ruling affirms a longstanding principle in bid-protest jurisprudence: agencies retain wide discretion in how they conduct best-value tradeoffs, provided the methodology is disclosed in the solicitation and applied consistently.
Assertive Professionals and Tellus Strategies each filed parallel challenges at the Court of Federal Claims following the September 2025 re-award. By denying both protesters' motions and granting the government's and awardees' cross-motions, the court eliminated any remaining avenue for overturning the awards through federal claims litigation.
Three Years of Protest History
The CLOVER saga began in May 2023, when NGA made its original round of awards under the contract. Almost immediately, losing offerors filed protests alleging that some awardees had gaps in their SAM.gov registration at the time of award — a threshold eligibility requirement under federal acquisition regulations.
Rather than conduct a full re-evaluation, NGA initially attempted to cure those registration issues through a deviation from the Federal Acquisition Regulation. That shortcut drew its own protest from Zolon PCS II LLC, and the Court of Federal Claims ruled against NGA, finding the FAR deviation "arbitrary and capricious." The court's ruling left NGA with no choice but to restart the evaluation process properly.
NGA conducted a complete re-evaluation of all offerors and issued a new award decision in September 2025. The re-evaluation produced one change in the awardee slate: Compass replaced prior awardee Credence Dynamo Solutions. The other four positions remained unchanged. Washington Technology reported the re-award shortly after it was announced, noting that the contract supports acquisition management, financial management, and strategic business management functions within NGA.
The June 15 ruling on the post-re-award protests marks the definitive end of the litigation chapter. CLOVER replaces NGA's incumbent EMERALD program, which had been the agency's prior vehicle for comparable professional services work.
Contract Scope and Small Business Structure
CLOVER is structured as a small-business set-aside multiple-award IDIQ, a design that reflects NGA's commitment to competitive task-order awards rather than single-vendor dominance across a large services scope. The vehicle covers three functional areas: acquisition management, financial management, and strategic business management. All three support NGA's broader mission as the primary producer of geospatial intelligence for the U.S. defense and intelligence communities. The solicitation used a self-scoring approach in which each offeror submitted claimed points across the evaluation criteria, which NGA's evaluators then independently verified.
With five awardees holding active positions on the contract, NGA must conduct task-order competitions among those companies rather than directing work to a single contractor. That structure creates recurring competitive events for the awardees and establishes a defined closed pool for the life of the IDIQ.
The $947 million ceiling is an aggregate figure across all awardees and all task orders over the IDIQ's ordering period. Individual task orders are expected to vary widely in size, covering everything from program management support to budget analysis and strategic planning functions that touch NGA's intelligence community relationships.
What It Means for Contractors
For the five awardees, the court's ruling removes the last legal cloud over CLOVER and opens the path to active task-order solicitations. NGA can now issue requests for task-order proposals without the risk that a pending protest could force another corrective action. Companies holding CLOVER positions should expect NGA to accelerate its task-order pipeline, particularly for acquisition management and financial management functions that have likely been in a holding pattern during the litigation.
For companies that were not among the five awardees, the ruling forecloses any remaining entry points into CLOVER through protest. The vehicle is fully closed to new awardees. Firms seeking NGA professional services work will need to pursue teaming arrangements with one of the five incumbents or wait for NGA's next competitive vehicle when CLOVER's ordering period concludes.
The court's rejection of the mathematical-calculation argument for adjectival ratings carries broader implications for companies evaluating protest strategies. Offerors cannot successfully challenge an agency evaluation solely on the grounds that the evaluators did not reduce qualitative judgments to numerical scores, provided the solicitation permitted qualitative assessment. This reinforces the importance of reviewing solicitation evaluation criteria carefully before assuming a protest theory will hold.
Small businesses with acquisition management or financial management capabilities and existing intelligence community clearances should prioritize relationship development with the five CLOVER awardees now. As task-order competitions open, teaming positions on individual orders will be the primary competitive opportunity available to firms outside the IDIQ pool. NGA's reliance on cleared small businesses for these functions creates a meaningful market for subcontracting work across the vehicle's active life.
