January 09, 2025

Federal News Network Interviews Christopher Griesedieck on Bid Protest Changes Under the FY25 NDAA

2 min

On January 9, 2025, Federal News Network interviewed Christopher Griesedieck on bid protest changes under the fiscal year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). According to Federal News Network, both the Defense Department and the Government Accountability Office have been enlisted to develop a strategy in which companies would repay legal costs after losing protest bids.

When asked if this concept is new, Griesedieck explained that “It’s not … There was a clause in the fiscal year 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, where Congress passed a very similar but more limited pilot program to have contractors who lost a bid protest pay the Department of Defense for its costs of litigating the protest.”

“But it only would have applied to contractors who were receiving over $250 million in revenue and it was scrapped a couple of years later,” he added.

He also touched on the differences in the conditions under which recovery could be feasible for the government. “Well, there are a few differences from before. No. 1, the payments would not just be to DoD. It would also be to the GAO would be the idea for its costs as well,” he shared. “No. 2 is that there’s actually a third party you’d be paying now, which would be the awardee, because when you protest at the GAO, it freezes the procurement in place and the new awardee can’t perform for 100 days while the protest is pending. And so they have lost profit. And the idea is that they would be entitled to receive that lost profit from the protester if the protester loses.”

Click here to access the segment.