President Obama has signed into law HR 5995, which reinstates the Government Accountability Office’s jurisdiction over protests of civilian task orders.
The GAO jurisdiction had expired at the end of fiscal 2016. The new law makes the GAO authority permanent.
During the two and half months since the authority expired, companies could not protest most civilian task orders. There was a little bit of a gray area involving whether there could be a protest of a task order if a defense buyer was using a civilian contract.
Several protests were filed involving this scenario, but GAO eventually ruled that it didn’t have jurisdiction and dismissed those protests.
Keep reading this article at: https://washingtontechnology.com/blogs/editors-notebook/2016/12/protest-authority-restored.aspx