McKinsey & Company: Super-Spreaders Of Technocracy

One of the many side effects of the pandemic has been the unchecked spread of management consultants. Vast government projects – once the domain of ministers and civil servants – have been outsourced to a swelling parallel state. And while every country has its own homegrown consultants, one company in particular seems to be everywhere.

At the weekend, Mario Draghi, Italy’s unelected, technocratic prime minister, hired consulting firm McKinsey & Company. Its role? To help decide how best to spend Italy’s €209 billion slice of the EU Recovery Fund. This is an extraordinary coup. Draghi is essentially drawing on a consultancy firm to shape the central plank of his domestic policy agenda – securing the post-pandemic recovery, and keeping a tight leash on the use of EU funds, are supposed to be the key justifications for his appointment.

Over in France, a nation known for its strong state and its elite caste of public administrators, the growth of consultancy spending during the pandemic has been a bigger shock to the system than elsewhere. And the lion’s share of Covid consulting contracts went to… McKinsey.

‘Every day at 5pm, top officials from the French health ministry tune in to one of many daily meetings set up to oversee the rollout of vaccinations. What’s different about this Zoom call is that it’s not chaired by a civil servant, but by a consultant from McKinsey & Company’, says an exposé in Politico.

Even before the pandemic, under Emmanuel Macron’s presidency, more and more of the state’s basic functions – including the development of economic and climate policy – have been outsourced to management consultants.

Macron’s experience with McKinsey even goes back to his time as François Hollande’s economy minister. The firm helped develop his ‘new economic opportunities’ bill. The bill was dropped but is widely credited with accelerating his split with the Socialist Party, and inspiring his own neoliberal platform for government.

In the UK, the state’s reliance on management consultants has ballooned to such absurd proportions that the Cabinet Office has even asked management consultants for advice on how to reduce the state’s dependence on management consultants. Most of the Covid spoils have gone to British firms like Deloitte and KPMG. But McKinsey is by far the biggest global consultancy on the government’s books. Ex-McKinseyite Dido Harding was plugged to set up NHS Test and Trace and McKinsey has had some involvement in Covid testing more broadly.