Liberal Buttigieg critics take aim at McKinsey work for health insurer and supermarket chain

Facing pressure from 2020 primary rivals, such as Elizabeth Warren, and reporters, Buttigieg’s campaign late on Tuesday disclosed the list of nine clients, starting from when he first joined McKinsey’s Chicago office in 2007. His gig at McKinsey followed a string of jobs he landed after he graduated from Harvard College in 2004, including becoming the Cohen Group’s conference director from 2004 to 2005. Buttigieg spent two years after that as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford.

“To act on my values, I have released all my tax returns since I completed my education, a standard that, unfortunately, no other candidate in this race has been willing to meet,” Buttigieg wrote in a statement. “It is also why I released a summary of my work at McKinsey even though it was my first job out of school, where I had little decision-making authority. It is also why I worked to be released from my confidentiality agreement with the firm so that I could responsibly release this information instead of accede to political pressure to violate the agreement.”

While describing his three-month stint on McKinsey’s Blue Cross project, Buttigieg said he was mostly involved in spreadsheet and presentation software grunt work to help the insurer lower its “overhead expenditures.” When pressed during an interview on his potential role in Blue Cross’s decision to lay off roughly 1,000 employees two years later in 2009, Buttigieg, who was first elected mayor in 2011, expressed doubt he was influential in the process.

“I don’t know what happened in the time after I left,” he told MSNBC late on Tuesday. “What I do know is there are some voices in the Democratic primary right now who are calling for policy that would eliminate the job of every single American working at every single insurance company in the country.”

Buttigieg’s response upset liberal figures such as Adam Jentleson. That anger was then reignited Wednesday when it emerged Buttigieg said at a 2011 South Bend Chamber of Commerce event that Blue Cross “didn’t even know what the people working for them were doing.”

“Pete trying to fob off his work like this is disingenuous. In consultant-speak, ‘savings’ and ‘spreadsheets’ mean layoffs,” tweeted Jentleson, former deputy chief of staff to then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Warren ally.

The other problematic project for Buttigieg was his six months with Loblaws in Toronto. Campaign spokesman Sean Savett was forced to distance his candidate Wednesday from a scandal in which Loblaw Companies admitted in 2017 to taking part in a 14-year scheme between large-scale bakers to raise the price of bread in Canada.

“He was part of a team that ran analytics and put together a model to help this supermarket chain determine how much — and in what stores — they could make certain items more affordable in order to gain new customers,” Savett told BuzzFeed News in a defense backed up by Loblaws itself.

Scrutiny over Buttigieg’s corporate career comes as he and Warren, the senior senator from Massachusetts with whom he is vying for the professional-class, college-educated vote, clash over transparency. The pair has fired off competing claims the other is beholden to private sector interests. The mayor defended his employment history in a separate interview.

“Most Americans work in the private sector. And I think the experience I got there served me well. If you’re going to manage the largest economy in the world, it’s probably a good idea that you’ve had a little bit of professional experience looking at a balance sheet or knowing what an income statement is,” he told the Atlantic.