Why Is a Winning Protester Still Capped at $150 an Hour?

On October 13, 1994, the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act became law and put a price on winning a bid protest: $150 an hour, the ceiling on what a protester could recover for its lawyers.

On October 13, 2026, thirty-two years to the day, GAO recommended that FEMA pay a winning protester $313 an hour.

The redacted decision reached GAO's public docket today, eight days after the General Counsel signed it.

"If the cap has not moved since 1994, what is a sustained protest actually worth per hour?"

VMD Systems Integrators, a women-owned small business in Fairfax, Virginia, had been thrown out of a FEMA competition for project management and cyber security compliance support services under RFQ 70FA3123Q00000045. GAO sustained its protest in March 2025 (B-422384.3, B-422384.5). FEMA had eliminated VMD's quotation for pricing labor categories under schedule SINs other than the one the solicitation was issued under, and the solicitation never limited the SINs. A second ground was sustained because the agency did not substantively respond to it.

Last week's decision is the bill. B-422384.7, $60,933.08 requested, granted.

A number from 1994, still in the statute

The cap sits in 31 U.S.C. § 3554(c)(2)(B), and it has been there, at the same figure, since FASA rewrote the subsection. Congress has been back into section 3554 three times since, in 1996, 2009 and 2013. Every one of those amendments landed somewhere else: the 100-day decision clock, the reporting requirements, the task-order jurisdiction. The money paragraph has not been reopened in thirty-two years.

What that means in practice is the chart below. Restated by CPI-U, the $150 Congress wrote in October 1994 is $338.07 in September 2026 money.

Run it the other way and the cap buys today what $66.55 bought on the day it was enacted. That is 55.6% of its value gone.

So the $308 to $313 GAO blessed, between 2.05 and 2.09 times the nominal cap, is the 1994 number indexed.