Will Dawson JD ’22 recently published the note “Data Scarcity in Bid Protests: Problems and Proposed Solutions,” in the American Bar Association’s Public Contract Law Journal. The note analyzes the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) bid protest system and offers data-driven improvements.
“The bid protest system is an integral part of a well-functioning federal procurement program. Unfortunately, the GAO, which is largely responsible for bid protests, does not publish much data on how the system is functioning, and what data is published is easy to misinterpret and provides little in the way of actionable information,” said Mr. Dawson.
Mr. Dawson has written a program which enables the computer-aided analysis of over 7,000 bid protests at the GAO. His note seeks to articulate the data which that research uncovered and proposes a data collection program which would greatly expand the information currently available with little additional labor from government employees.
“My article explains how the data in the GAO’s annual reports invites misinterpretation, and then proposes a more detailed reporting scheme, and discusses a program I have written to generate the needed data with minimal additional workload for the government. With this additional data, the health of the protest system can be effectively analyzed and allows targeted improvements to be acted upon,” said Mr. Dawson.
He thanks the GW Law community for the support he has received as he approached this research. "Introducing coding and data to legal analysis can be met with trepidation. The professors and fellow students at GW were not only open to, but extremely encouraging about, the novel application of data science to legal and policy issues,” said Mr. Dawson. “I continue to be grateful for the amount of time and support the GW community has provided over the course of this project. The openness to new approaches is what continues to make GW such a unique place to have the privilege of attending.”
Mr. Dawson’s note is also available for free on SSRN here.
Additional Resources
- Learn about GW Professor Christopher Yukins’ role as a principal investigator for Congress’ current efforts to improve the Bid Protest process, which features Mr. Dawson’s research here.
- Federal News Network's "Federal Drive Show" podcast dedicated an episode to a discussion about Mr. Dawson’s note and research. Listen to the episode here.