Whose Past Performance Are You Actually Bidding?

If your last proposal claimed an affiliated company's past performance, GAO spent Tuesday describing what that proposal needed to say.

Four decisions came off the docket at once, and three of them are DoD.

One is sustained, and the single ground that carried it runs through every corporate-family and teaming arrangement on your pipeline sheet.

"What does a proposal have to say before an agency can credit the parent's record?"

The One Ground That Worked

Battelle Memorial Institute protested the National Science Foundation's award to KBR Services under RFP 49100425R0006, the Antarctic Science and Engineering Support contract.

Single-award IDIQ. A 20-year ordering period and an $8 billion ceiling on all orders placed.

Four offerors made it to phase II and all four landed in the competitive range. Battelle and KBR came out of the evaluation tied on every adjectival rating, which left price: $13,780,506 against KBR's $8,423,908, built from two sample task orders and a pre-transition order rather than anything resembling the ceiling.

Battelle's digest runs to seven numbered holdings. Six are denials.

The seventh is the one to read. NSF credited KBR with the experience and past performance of an affiliated company, and KBR's proposal never articulated what that affiliate would actually contribute.

GAO applied the rule the Court of Federal Claims set this year in Noblis MSD, LLC v. United States, 180 Fed. Cl. 667 (2026). Where a solicitation is silent on what an offeror must show to claim an affiliate's record, the default is that the agency may credit it only "so long as the offeror explains how the subcontractors or affiliates will be used to perform the work." General statements of corporate unity do not clear it. Neither does the fact of affiliation.

The line the court used, quoted back in this decision, belongs on a proposal manager's wall. An evaluator "would have no way to understand . . . what role Sigma would play in performance."