Consulting giant McKinsey may have gotten a lot of bad PR over the past year - from its collaboration with the murderous Saudi regime to its work to expand Riker's Island to its critical role in ICE gulags - but it's fitting in GREAT in the Trump covid response.
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All told, McKinsey's made $100m for its role in the blundering, chundering comedy-of-errors that is the Trump admin's coronavirus response, much of it in no-bid contracts awarded by former McKinsey employees who landed senior roles in the Trump admin.
propublica.org/article/how-mc…
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propublica.org/article/how-mc…
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That total is still climbing, too. @i_m_m's @propublica investigation into McKinsey's coronavirus engagements finds their tentacles sunk into the VA, the Defense Health Agency, the USAF, the Cuomo regime, and the state governments of CA, IL, MA, NK, TN and VA.
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McKinsey's also raking it in from cities like Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans and St Louis. Where these contracts are for important work, McKinsey routinely fails to deliver. Much of the work McKinsey won for itself is largely cosmetic, though.
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In both cases, they bill top dollar (naturally).
It's a lucky break for the company, which has been hamstrung by its own failures - for example, its bankruptcy division can't win much work after a series of conflict of interest scandals.
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It's a lucky break for the company, which has been hamstrung by its own failures - for example, its bankruptcy division can't win much work after a series of conflict of interest scandals.
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It's also been targeted by the General Services Agency for years of brutal price-gouging, and the company was caught using its influence to sideline the GSA investigators in a bid to prevent bad news about its corrupt practices from coming to light.
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This cost the company much of its pre-coronavirus public sector work, making the new round of fat contracts a godsend. And much of that work was steered McKinsey's way by former McKinsey staffers - or current staffers who have been contracted to oversee government contracts.
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MacDougall tracks the many ways that McKinsey underperformed in these contracts, at the expense of American lives and safety.
He also tracks the company's 70-year campaign to replace government functions with private contractors, an ideology it spread around the world.
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He also tracks the company's 70-year campaign to replace government functions with private contractors, an ideology it spread around the world.
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"Over decades, McKinsey’s approach became self-reinforcing. As administrations chipped away at the civil service politicians who advocate small government got the dysfunctional bureaucracy they had complained about all along, which helped them justify dismantling it further."
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One of McKinsey's most lucrative lines of work is selling "data it obtains from one government project to other agencies," becoming the clearinghouse - and rentier - of public data, generated at public expense, for use by public agencies.
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Those data repositories were cited as the reason that McKinsey needed to be hired to run so much of the government coronavirus response.
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The company cites the "pro bono" work its employees have done during the crisis, but the government officials whom this work was supposed to benefit say that it was useless - prettying up spreadsheets and making slide decks.
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McKinsey's own description of what it can offer to government clients is a meaningless word-salad of consulting jargon: "analysis, best practices, perspectives, decision support." Seriously #GPT3 would produce more convincing pitches.
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As Miami-Dade deputy mayor Jennifer Moon dryly observed after getting one of these McKinsey pitches: "Apparently, it takes 5 people with staff support to do what I’ve been doing myself." The bill for those people? $142k/week.
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Normally, McKinsey swears its clients to secrecy about their contracting with the firm and refuses to disclose its client list, but during the pandemic, McKinsey changed its terms to let it cite its clients to drum up new work - while still gagging those clients.
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This one-sided confidentiality lets the company boast of its work in places like Miami-Dade, while gagging the officials who found the work substandard and actively harmful, at a cost of more than $500k.
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