Retreaded - concur, it's a confusing scenario for all of us. I'm not with either the small or the large business and am trying to determine the viability of the pending small business scenario.
Vern - you succinctly described the situation, thanks for clarifying for all of us. I read the citation you provided and see the ruling the large may protest as interested party.
As a followup note to the referred case, Swank's main premise for the protest is based on task complexity being too high for a small to perform which was denied. In the situation I described, the large business argument would be that they already competed/won the contract to perform the same scope of work described in the pre-solicitation for the same department and their contract period of performance would still has several years left.
Based on Vern's input, the Government can remove a task from the scope but can it create a situation where the task are split between two contracts?