GAO intervention, stop-work orders, and awardee continuity
Terms for the awardee side — , record preservation, , and continuity of services.
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GAO intervention
When a protest targets your award, assess intervention promptly under GAO’s rules (4 CFR Part 21), engage qualified protest counsel, preserve proposal and evaluation-related records you control, and centralize customer communications. Intervention protects proprietary and competitive interests; it does not authorize company personnel to browse protected material freely or to lobby evaluators into a new rationale.
Watch for
Don’t treat winning as license to create post-hoc justifications, control the ’s workforce, or rewrite the record through protest response.
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Stop-work order (FAR 52.233-3)
If the issues a written stop-work order under FAR 52.233-3, comply. Transition planning should maintain executable continue, pause, and restart paths, mitigate and segregate affected costs, and use continuity such as FAR 52.237-3 when they apply — without assuming every protest-related cost will be reimbursed. Performance direction comes from the contracting officer, not from protest counsel or program-office optimism.
Watch for
Don’t keep the team fully productive on contract tasks after a stop-work order to sort allowability later. Ignoring the stay or stop-work while hoping for a quick dismissal is not risk management.