Judge Rules Alliant Awards Are “Arbitrary, Capricious” A federal judge has blocked GSA’s $50 billion Alliant governmentwide acquisition contract because of errors in the source selection process. In upholding protests by eight losing bidders, Judge Francis Allegra of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington found practically every aspect of GSA’s source selection was flawed. He said the result was “award decisions that were arbitrary, capricious and otherwise contrary to law.” The ruling, released March 4, blocks GSA from awarding task orders under the contract. The judge said the agency could try to reach an agreement with the protestors, such as by awarding them places on the contract. Lawyers involved in the case said the ruling has no direct impact on the $15 billion Alliant Small Business GWAC. However, if the same source selection scheme was used for the Small Business GWAC, it could be vulnerable to protest on the same grounds. A GSA spokesman did not respond to requests for comment. GSA awarded 62 contracts on Alliant Small Business in December. Four losing bidders have filed protests, according to the Government Accountability Office. Judge Allegra said GSA did not pay enough attention to price in making awards on the full and open Alliant. He found that CSC, SAIC and Mantech won awards, although their proposed prices were among the highest and were more than twice as high as the lowest offer. He also faulted GSA’s use of past performance ratings. The agency hired a contractor, Calyptus, to conduct past performance surveys, but the judge said the contractor was given only vague instructions. GSA assigned ratings for past performance such as “exceptionally high confidence” or “acceptable confidence,” then converted those ratings into numerical scores. “Combining, averaging and weighting these figures, the agency ended up with technical scores that were carried out to three decimal points (e.g., 3.817) – and it made critical distinctions among the sixty-two offerors based upon the thousandths of a point,” Allegra wrote. “…This false precision can act like a siren charming the unwary into making arbitrary comparisons based upon digits that are not meaningful…” “[T]he court concludes that GSA, in attaching talismanic significance to technical calculations that suffer from false precision, made distinctions that, in their own right, likely were arbitrary, capricious and contrary to law, but certainly became so when the agency failed adequately to account for price and to make appropriate tradeoff decisions.”