GAO Recommends Reimbursement of Costs Protesting Agency’s Best-Value Tradeoff Decision, Which Were Intertwined with Meritorious Challenges to Evaluation of Experience and Past Performance; GAO B-413116.38, Chags Health Information Technology LLC, et al—Costs

Multiple requests that GAO recommend the agency reimburse the protesters’ reasonable costs of pursing their protests of the agency award decision are denied in part, where the protest grounds were clearly severable from arguments the agency conceded were reasonable, and were not clearly meritorious, and sustained in part, where GAO concluded that challenges to the agency’s best-value trade-off decision were not severable from the clearly meritorious protests challenging the agency’s evaluation of corporate experience and past performance, because the best-value tradeoff decision relied heavily on portions of the evaluation the agency conceded were flawed.