Elizabeth Warren has criticized 2020 Democratic primary rival Pete Buttigieg for his work at McKinsey & Co. But the Massachusetts senator has ties of her own to the management consulting firm.
Last week, Warren, 70, targeted the South Bend, Indiana, mayor's work for McKinsey from 2007-2010, and called on him to release the list of all his former clients. Buttigieg, 37, has repeatedly said he is forbidden from disclosing all of his former clients from doing because of legally-binding non-disclosure agreements.
"Look, I understand that there are some candidates who want to distract from the fact they have not released the names of their clients, and they have not released the names of their bundlers, who right now in this campaign are gathering up big checks who are getting special access to the candidate," Warren said Nov. 26 in Des Moines, Iowa.
Warren's jabs at Buttigieg came after he overtook her for top position in some polls surveying the first two nominating contests, the Feb. 3 Iowa Caucuses and Feb. 11 New Hampshire primary.
Warren has pitched herself as a left-wing populist, suspicious of corporate power. Warren's criticism of management consulting firms like McKinsey began after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018. At the time, two months before Warren entered the presidential race, she wrote the company's global managing partner Kevin Sneader, asking for information on its relationship with Saudi Arabia and other foreign governments.
“I am concerned that McKinsey’s report on public perception may have been weaponized by the Saudi government to crush criticism of the kingdom’s policies, regardless of McKinsey’s intended purpose for the information,” she wrote.
At the time, McKinsey was accused of helping the Saudi government track dissidents and critics of the regime.
Warren followed up that letter with another the next month, asking three more consulting firms to disclose all the services they provided to the Kingdom and its affiliated entities.
"Given the Kingdom's recent actions, your firms' continued business relationships with this government appear to be inconsistent not only with American values but with your stated principles," Warren wrote to the heads of Booz Allen, Boston Consulting Group, and Deloitte Consulting Services.
But Warren didn't mention her own experience retaining McKinsey for consulting services, going back to her days as a Harvard Law School professor. In 1999, under Warren's directorship, the law school retained the firm's services to help formulate a "long-term development" plan.
Warren, who chaired the school's Institutional Life Committee and helped steer the $800,000-$1 million McKinsey study, said she landed on the firm after interviewing a number of competitors because of their history working with other educational institutions.
The hiring of the firm led to widespread criticism by both students and faculty, who called the project a waste of the law school's funds. Much of the firm's purported recommendations, like class size reduction and general student unhappiness, were things a simple internal survey could have concluded.
Warren was forced to deny a Boston Globe report that the school was overhauling much of its services based on McKinsey's advice.
"[The Globe story] acts like we're on the threshold of some big change here at the law school — nope," she said in January 2000. "Maybe eventually, but now we're still in the discussion phase."
The Warren campaign, in a statement to the Washington Examiner, said, "In 1999 Harvard Law School hired McKinsey to conduct a student satisfaction survey and Elizabeth ran the committee that worked with the firm hired by the school."
While Warren was dealing with the fallout from that contract, Warren's daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi was concluding her own work with the firm. From 1996 to 1999, Tyagi served as an engagement manager at McKinsey, focused on healthcare, finance, education, and pharmaceuticals. That followed her stint as a co-founder of a health benefits company. Tyagi currently serves as the CEO of Business Talent Group, which contracts thousands of independent consultants.
The mother-daughter team has collaborated on two books, The Two-Income Trap, released in 2004 and All Your Worth, in 2005.
