Agency Not Required to Compare Proposed Cost to Technical Approach When RFP Mandated Labor Categories, Hours, and Other Costs; GAO B-413120.3, Engility Corporation

Protest challenging the agency’s discussions as not meaningful, misleading, and unequal is denied, where the agency’s discussions provided the protester with all the information required about unaddressed deficiencies in its proposal, where the agency provided the protester with detailed information about deficiencies and weaknesses in its proposal during an earlier debriefing, and where the debriefings held after an initial award decision were wholly separate from the discussions held after the agency took corrective action; and protest challenging the agency’s past performance evaluation is denied, where the agency reasonably considered a negative CPAR, even though the protester disputed this evaluation, where the agency reasonably assigned a weakness to a subcontractor reference that entirely redacted except for the adjectival ratings, and where the agency reasonably considered negative past performance information from the incumbent contract over three years to amount to three separate problems, not one problem improperly counted three times; and protest challenging the agency’s evaluation of the protester’s technical proposal is denied, where the agency’s findings were reasonable, where the agency considered the weaknesses minor, and where the evaluation of the technical proposals was not determinative in the best value tradeoff decision; and protest challenging the agency’s cost realism evaluation is denied, where the agency reasonably considered the protester’s actual 2015 rates for the geographic area where the requirement would be performed when determining the realism of the offeror’s proposed price, where the RFP did not establish specific education or experience requirements and therefore the awardee was able to propose employees with less experience, and where the agency was not required to compare offerors’ pricing to their technical approach, because the RFP required offerors to use the same labor categories, hours, and other costs, and therefore the technical approach of all offerors was identical.