On federal work, protests are generally filed with the procuring agency first, then can go to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) under the Competition in Contracting Act of 1984 (CICA), which can suspend the award while it rules and typically resolves protests within 100 calendar days; only an "interested party" — a bidder with a direct economic stake in the outcome — can file. State and local agencies each set their own protest procedures and, critically, their own deadlines, which are often measured in days rather than weeks after the apparent low bidder is announced — so in practice, the rules that matter are almost always the ones written into that specific agency's bidding documents, not any federal default. Because the window to act is often so short, having a clear, structured picture of what a bid package actually required — scope, deadlines, bonding, mandatory forms, addenda — before bid day is worth more than being able to react quickly after the fact. That's the kind of document-level read Nonlinear produces from the raw bid documents as part of qualifying an opportunity in the first place.
Knowledge Base
What is a bid protest?
A bid protest is a formal written challenge to how an agency ran a procurement — the terms of the solicitation, how a bid was scored, or who it decided to award to — filed by a bidder who believes the process broke a rule.
