## Facts

- The General Services Administration (GSA), acting under an Office of Management and Budget designation, solicited proposals for the Veterans Technology Services Government-wide Acquisition Contract (VETS-GWAC), a multiple-award IDIQ reserved for service-disabled, veteran-owned small businesses (SDVOSBs).
- The VETS-GWAC was structured to create a pool of “most highly qualified offerors” eligible to compete for later task orders limited to contract awardees.
- The solicitation evaluated proposals on technical merit and price; technical merit depended heavily on a contract performance plan addressing specified IT work-scope elements, with credit available for government and commercial experience.
- Knowledge Connections, Inc. (KCI), an SDVOSB, submitted a proposal but was eliminated during technical evaluation as not among the most highly qualified offerors.
- KCI filed a bid protest in the Court of Federal Claims under 28 U.S.C. § 1491(b)(1), challenging aspects of the evaluation approach, including alleged improper preference for government experience and alleged overemphasis on breadth of experience.
- The government moved to dismiss, asserting KCI lacked standing because it was not an “interested party.”

## Issues

1. Whether KCI qualified as an “interested party” with standing under 28 U.S.C. § 1491(b)(1) after exclusion from a multi-award GWAC pre-qualification pool.
2. Whether certain early challenges to the solicitation and evaluation approach (including the breadth-versus-depth complaint) were legally sufficient or should be rejected under the bid-protest standard of review.

## Decision

- The court denied the government’s motion to dismiss, holding KCI was an “interested party” with standing under 28 U.S.C. § 1491(b)(1).
- The court concluded KCI’s allegations plausibly implicated a direct economic interest because exclusion from the pool foreclosed later opportunities to compete for task orders.
- The court rejected two of KCI’s three asserted procurement-error theories at that stage, leaving one protest theory to proceed.

## Legal Principles

- Bid-protest standing under 28 U.S.C. § 1491(b)(1) requires an actual or prospective bidder with a direct economic interest affected by the procurement and a non-frivolous showing of a substantial chance of award but for the alleged error.
- In multi-award, qualification-type procurements, the “substantial chance” inquiry may focus on whether the alleged error plausibly deprived the protester of inclusion in the awardee pool and the resulting opportunity to compete for downstream task orders.
- Under § 1491(b)(4) and APA review, procurement actions are set aside only if arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or contrary to law; courts generally defer to agency technical judgments and the structuring and weighting of evaluation criteria when consistent with the solicitation and applicable authority.

## Conclusion

The court held that an offeror excluded from a GWAC pre-qualification pool can have standing where alleged evaluation errors plausibly affected its chance of pool inclusion and related economic opportunities, while also dismissing early merits challenges that sought to overturn the agency’s evaluation design and technical judgment without a sufficient legal basis.


Knowledge Connections, Inc. v. United States, 76 Fed. Cl. 6 (Fed. Cl. 2007)