Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign late this week tried to detail his work history at McKinsey & Co., which Democratic rivals say is a necessary step due to the management consultant firm’s reported roster of unsavory clients.
Lis Smith, spokeswoman for the South Bend, Indiana, mayor’s White House campaign, spent the better part of Friday tweeting assurances the candidate is attempting to get released from a nondisclosure agreement about his McKinsey work from 2007-2010, following college at Harvard University and two years as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. Then on Friday night, Buttigieg, 37, issued a statement summarizing his projects there.
“To the best of my recollection, these are all of my client engagements during my time with the firm,” Buttigieg said without offering further details, which are currently under wraps in the nondisclosure agreement.
But critics on the Left say the fact that he worked at the management consulting firm at all makes him suspect. In their view, the McKinsey experience is another check mark in Buttigieg’s rise in the establishment, along with his elite education and later military service as a Navy Reserve intelligence officer, becoming a lieutenant and deploying to Afghanistan in 2014.
That stands in marked contrast to 2020 Democratic rivals like Bernie Sanders, said Nomiki Konst, a supporter of the Vermont senator and former Democratic National Committee member.
“He comes in as this mayor of a Midwest town,” Konst said. “But his experience is really around the intelligence community, whether at McKinsey or in the military.”
For months, Buttigieg resisted calls from her rivals like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and liberal activists to release specifics about his McKinsey work.
“There are some candidates who want to distract from the fact that they have not released the names of their clients and have not released the names of their bundlers,” Warren said last month.
The jabs by Warren, 70, come as McKinsey draws increasing broad scrutiny over its clients.
The firm worked with Purdue Pharma, the maker of the opioid-based painkiller OxyContin, to boost its drug sales. It has also reportedly done consulting work for the governments of China and Saudi Arabia, and, in critics’ eyes, assisted those regimes in cracking down on dissenters. And it had to pull all business out of Africa after it was implicated in a massive corruption scheme in South Africa.
And a recent ProPublica investigation found that in the United States, McKinsey was instrumental in helping the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency construct its detention apparatus that has drawn criticism as inhumane.
“I think that the first suspicions rose around the economic crisis where the management consultants took a role in government and motivated Wall Street banks into setting up regulatory standards that maximize profits,” Konst said. “They consulted that workers don’t need as many protections or power.
Buttigieg’s “work in these places ought to be questioned,” she said.
None of the recent McKinsey controversies happened when Buttigieg worked there. But skeptics say the nature of the firm’s work is consistent with a candidate’s platform of incremental, rather than radical, change.
“The fundamental question in politics is whose side are you on, who are you fighting for? Working at McKinsey would be fine if he was now challenging corporate interests like big tech and big insurance companies,” said Progressive Change Campaign Committee co-founder Adam Green.
