Tribal Health, LLC (B-422738.2; B-422738.3)

You should care.

Categories: IDIQ, process issue

Date: 12 December 2025

URL: https://www.gao.gov/products/b-422738.2,b-422738.3

Tribal Health protested HHS’s sole-source issuance of a nine-month task order to Prime Physicians for emergency department management and staffing services at the Rosebud IHS Hospital. The decision is useful mainly for its treatment of task-order jurisdiction and the limits of scope challenges.

GAO dismissed the protest for two reasons. First, the fixed-price order was issued for $9,988,422, which fell below the $10 million civilian-agency task-order protest threshold. Tribal Health urged GAO to look past the order’s face value, but GAO refused because the order did not include options or any unconventional compensation method. Second, Tribal Health’s “scope” arguments did not actually show the order exceeded the scope of the underlying IDIQ contract. Instead, the protest complained about how the agency used the contract’s ordering procedures, including sole-sourcing and a shorter performance period.

GAO treated those arguments as challenges to the manner of issuance, not to the scope of work itself. Because the requirement, including competition mechanism (sole-source), plainly fit within the IDIQ, GAO lacked jurisdiction.

The protest is dismissed.

Digest

1. GAO lacks jurisdiction to consider a protest alleging that a task order was improperly issued under an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract by a civilian agency where the value of the task order is less than $10 million.
2. Protest arguing that the agency improperly increased the scope of the underlying IDIQ contract by allegedly deviating from the terms of the IDIQ contract in the issuance of a task order is dismissed because the protester's arguments do not demonstrate that the task order is outside the scope of the underlying IDIQ contract.