A federal judge on Monday abruptly dismissed a losing bidder’s lawsuit over a $45-billion Department of Energy contract at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
According to an online notice, an “order of dismissal” was issued under seal by U.S. Court of Federal Claims Judge Marian Blank Horn in a bid protest brought by an Atkins-led team challenging DOE’s award of the contract to the BWX Technologies-led Hanford Tank Waste Operations & Closure. The winner also includes Amentum and Fluor
That ends for now Hanford Tank Disposition Alliance’s protest in the federal courts — the losing bidder skipped the usual venue of Government Accountability Office — where the joint venture of Atkins, Jacobs and Westinghouse claimed that errors with the winner’s bid and missteps by DOE required the judge to reverse the agency’s April award of the Hanford Integrated Tanks Contract.
The dismissal follows arguments by the Justice Department, which represents the government in the case, that both teams made potentially fatal technical mistakes with their bids and that the dispute should be sent back to DOE for a fix. Each team accused the other of not properly registering their companies in the federal government’s procurement system, the System for Award Management.
The two-line notice of the order of dismissal was the only information on the order posted publicly Tuesday morning on the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system, the federal judiciary’s online court docket.
More details are unlikely to be available unless the judge releases a public, redacted version of the order. Redacted versions of most major filings in the case have tended to show up within a couple of days of the initial filing.
