Every incumbent contractor believes they’re the safest bet on the street when a federal proposal recompete comes around. They know the job, they know the customer, and they’ve been delivering for years. Yet a surprising number still lose. The reason has a name: incumbent-itis. Understanding how this disease actually takes hold — and building a federal proposal recompete process that inoculates against it, is the difference between defending a contract and handing it to a competitor.
What Is Incumbent-itis? Why Incumbents Lose Federal Proposal Recompetes
Theoretically, when faced with a federal proposal recompete, the incumbent should be in an unstoppable position. They know the job best. They know the customer personnel on a first-name basis. They know where the problems lie. And they should have deep insight into what the customer wants to see in the next phase of the program.
Yet in real life, many incumbents face an up-hill battle. I am always amazed to see how many lose the competition. The number one reason for losing I have seen is, for lack of a better word, “incumbent-itis”. This isn’t just an OCI turn of phrase, either — Washington Technology has written about the same phenomenon, describing it as a preventable trap that costs incumbents contracts they should have won easily. Below, I will discuss the three most common forms this disease can take.
Complacent Attitude
Although they should know better, the incumbents I have seen are complacent a majority of the time. They lull themselves into feeling secure because they know the program so well. They think, “those guys couldn’t possibly work this program without us.” Because of the almost unavoidable tendency to overestimate the strength of their position, they fail to budget enough resources to prepare the winning proposal. As a result, they run the risk of losing a valuable contract to a competitor who took the proposal process seriously. Incumbent complacency is, without question, the most common root cause behind a lost federal proposal recompete.
Failure to Use a Good Proposal Process
Because they know the program so well, incumbents often think they can short-change the proposal process — to just write the proposal by the “seat of their pants” method. Bidders who do this are courting disaster. Following, are a few of the steps they will want to use if they are really determined to win their federal proposal recompete:
Failure to Staff the Proposal Adequately
Probably the most common symptom of “incumbent-itis” is the failure to assign adequate staff to the proposal effort. Overconfident companies mistakenly believe their position is so strong they do not have to put many resources into the proposal team. The worst problem I have seen is to assign personnel who don’t have proposal experience to serve as proposal writers.
Thinking that anyone who knows the subject matter can write a proposal section, they will assign whoever is currently “on the bench” to the proposal team. This can be a devastating mistake because personnel who do not have several years of proposal writing experience usually can not write a proposal section that will score well in the proposal evaluation.
Need Help Beating Incumbent-itis?
Our consultants have guided incumbents through recompetes on contracts from $50 million to $1.5 billion, across every major federal agency. We’ll help you turn your incumbent advantage into a proposal that actually wins.
The Real Stakes: What Happens When You Lose a Recompete
Losing a federal proposal recompete isn’t a minor setback — it’s often one of the costliest outcomes a contractor can face. The revenue disappears immediately, but the damage compounds well beyond that first lost year. Displaced staff have to be reassigned or let go, disrupting teams that took years to build. A competitor gains a real foothold inside your customer relationship, with firsthand knowledge of the program you spent years cultivating. And once a recompete is lost, winning it back on the next cycle is dramatically harder — you’re now the outsider trying to unseat an incumbent, facing the exact same complacency trap you may have just fallen into yourself.
Case in point: This isn’t theoretical. In TYD Services, B-423648 (July 30, 2025), the Government Accountability Office denied an incumbent contractor’s bid protest after the Army Corps of Engineers found its recompete proposal technically unacceptable and incomplete. Legal coverage of the decision was blunt about the cause: commentary on the case explicitly attributed the loss to “incumbent-itis”, noting that even incumbents must fully comply with every proposal instruction, no matter how minor it seems. Incumbent status did not save the contractor from losing a contract it should have been well-positioned to defend.
Building a Recompete Process That Actually Wins
Avoiding a lost federal proposal recompete isn’t about working harder — it’s about treating the recompete with the same rigor as a brand-new competition, structured through a real process rather than instinct.
Why Proposal Writing Isn’t Just Writing
It is usually the case that, even good writers who lack proposal experience can not write a proposal section that scores well. This is because preparing a proposal section is a unique type of writing. The writer is not just writing a discursive essay. Instead, he or she must use a challenging process that includes the following:
- Determine what is the requirement
- Find evidence that demonstrates the company can perform that requirement in an excellent manner
- Fold in the “win themes”
- Be sure to emphasize features and benefits of the solution that are attractive to the customer
Unfortunately, personnel who are not seasoned proposal writers rarely can do this type of “pitchy” writing in a way that scores evaluation points.
The common solution to this problem is for the bidder company to employ professional proposal writer consultants. The consultants are then mated with the subject matter experts (SMEs) in the company. And together, the SMEs and the proposal writers can cooperate in successfully preparing proposal sections that score maximum points.
How they do this varies widely, depending on the skill sets of the different individuals. The proposal writer can help the SME with the outline; the proposal writer can interview the SME and write his or her section; or the proposal writer can iterate draft sections back and forth with the SME until they are good.
PTW vs. Competitive Analysis: Which Does Your Recompete Need?
The Competition Analysis step above isn’t one-size-fits-all. A Price-to-Win analysis and a full Competitive Analysis serve different purposes, and picking the wrong one wastes both budget and time on a recompete where timing is everything.
| Factor | Price-to-Win (PTW) | Competitive Analysis (CA) |
|---|---|---|
| Primary question answered | What price wins this specific bid? | Who are we really competing against, and why would they win or lose? |
| Depth | Narrower, price-focused | Broader — covers competitor strengths, weaknesses, and likely strategy |
| Typical use case | Price-sensitive recompetes with known competitors | High-stakes or unfamiliar competitive fields |
| Speed | Faster to complete | More time- and resource-intensive |
For most incumbent recompete strategy planning, a PTW is the minimum bar. When the competitive field is uncertain or the contract value is large enough to justify it, the more rigorous Competitive Analysis is worth the added investment.
When to Start Fighting Incumbent-itis
One gap incumbents consistently underestimate is timing. Capture planning for a federal proposal recompete should begin well before the RFP drops, ideally 12 to 18 months out for large, complex programs, and no later than 6 months out even for smaller ones.
Waiting until the RFP is released to start thinking about recompete proposal strategy all but guarantees the “seat of the pants” approach this article warns against, simply because there won’t be enough runway left to do it properly.
Self-Check: Are You Already Infected?
Before assuming your recompete is under control, run your team against this quick diagnostic. If more than one or two of these sound familiar, incumbent-itis may already be setting in:
- Are you assuming past performance alone will carry the proposal?
- Has your capture plan been written down, or does it only exist as a shared understanding?
- Are your proposal writers assigned based on proposal writing experience, or based on who’s “on the bench”?
- Have you completed a Price-to-Win or Competitive Analysis, or are you estimating your competitive position informally?
- Has a Red Team reviewed the proposal with a genuine mandate to find flaws, or just to confirm it looks fine?
How We Help You Beat Incumbent-itis
This isn’t abstract advice. Over 25 years as a proposal services vendor, OCI has assisted incumbents on contracts valued from $50 million to $1.5 billion, and these recompetes have consistently been among the most challenging assignments in the field — precisely because of the unique pressures incumbent bidders face. Every symptom of incumbent-itis diagnosed above maps directly to a service built to treat it:
If your team recognizes more than one symptom from the self-check above, that’s usually the signal that outside support will do more good now than after the RFP drops.
Frequently Asked Questions
Conclusion
“Incumbent-itis” is a really unfortunate problem, because it is a problem that doesn’t have to happen. Any incumbent who fails to take the competition very seriously has to take full responsibility for losing the contract. When it comes time to pin the blame on someone, they just need to look in the mirror.
Need Help Beating Incumbent-itis?
Our consultants have guided incumbents through recompetes on contracts from $50 million to $1.5 billion, across every major federal agency. We’ll help you turn your incumbent advantage into a proposal that actually wins.
