The Federal Circuit, in Island Creek Associates, LLC v. United States, No. 2025-1140 (Fed. Cir. Sept. 16, 2026), recently affirmed the dismissal of a bid protest brought by Island Creek Associates, LLC, a prime contractor on the Navy’s SeaPort-NxG multiple-award IDIQ contract (MAC). Tucked into the decision as an alternate basis for affirming the lower court’s dismissal is a clean statement of a rule that trips up contractors more often than it should: Holding your own contract in a MAC pool does not automatically give you standing to challenge someone else’s contract.

Background

Island Creek held one of the multitude of SeaPort-NxG MACs and protested a Navy modification to the MAC terms that let joint ventures in the Small Business Administration’s Mentor-Protégé Program hold a MAC alongside their individual mentor and protégé members — an exception that benefited a competing awardee, Precise Systems, and its joint venture partner. In its five-count complaint, Island Creek asked the Court of Federal Claims to require the removal of the MAC modification, to investigate and mitigate an alleged organizational conflict of interest (OCI) between a Navy contracting official and a Precise program manager who were married to each other, and to require recusal of the allegedly conflicted Navy employee.

As a result of the complaint, the Navy informed the court that it was taking corrective action in the form of not implementing the MAC modification and reverting to the previous language about the definition of joint ventures. The government sought to dismiss four of the five counts in the complaint on the grounds of mootness in the light of the corrective action. It also sought the dismissal of the fifth count since the court lacked jurisdiction because it was a challenge to a task order, and the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994 (FASA) barred such task order protests at the court.

The court instead dismissed the complaint for a separate reason, which was that the plaintiff lacked standing as an interested party to bring any count in the complaint. The notion is that the Tucker Act’s bid protest provision, 28 U.S.C. § 1491(b)(1), only lets an “interested party” bring a protest in the Court of Federal Claims. The Federal Circuit’s recent en banc decision in Percipient.ai, Inc. v. United States, 153 F.4th 1226 (Fed. Cir. 2025), has defined that term to require an actual or prospective bidder — in other words, a disappointed bidder — for the specific contract being challenged.

In this case, the court held that, as a MAC awardee, Island Creek lacked standing to challenge other MAC awards in the same procurement because it was no longer an actual or prospective bidder that could win another contract and, thus, suffered no economic injury by the award of a MAC to another company. Being a competitor in the same overall MAC program — even one with a live grievance about how a competitor got there — is not the same as being a disappointed bidder for that competitor’s specific contract. Without that direct nexus to the challenged award, Island Creek fell outside § 1491(b)(1)’s reach as to that piece of its claim, regardless of the merits of its OCI allegations.

On appeal, the Federal Circuit went in another direction and affirmed the dismissal of the complaint on mootness grounds and because of the FASA task order jurisdiction bar, both of which were arguments the Court of Federal Claims had not addressed. Nevertheless, the Federal Circuit in passing adopted, as an independent and alternative basis of dismissal, the rationale that Island Creek was not an interested party.

Why This Matters for Contractors

Standing under § 1491(b)(1) is tied to the particular contract or award you are challenging, not to your general status as a participant in the same procurement or MAC program. A few practical implications:

  • Successful does not equal interested. Winning your own award on a MAC does not automatically give you standing to challenge a different awardee’s contract on that same MAC. You generally need to show you were an actual or prospective bidder for the specific award you are challenging. 
  • Frame relief carefully. If your protest seeks to disqualify or unwind a competitor’s specific contract (as opposed to challenging a solicitation term or amendment that governs the whole program), expect the court to ask whether you competed, or could have competed, for that exact award.
  • Expect courts to examine standing even if other grounds are being argued to resolve the case. Here, the court addressed the interested-party issue as an alternative holding even though it had already resolved the appeal on mootness and statutory-bar grounds — a reminder that standing defects can be fatal to specific claims for relief even when other counts might survive on the merits.

If you have any questions about the foregoing or require assistance, please do not hesitate to contact Aron Beezley or Patrick Quigley.