Buttigieg Releases Names Of McKinsey Clients

Topline: After weeks of scrutiny from Democratic rivals and party activists, South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg released the long-awaited list of the clients he served when he was a consultant at McKinsey before he ran for office.

Here are the entities Buttigieg acted as a consultant for when he worked at the firm from 2007-2010. The campaign first disclosed the list in an interview with The Atlantic.  Generally, Buttigieg told The Atlantic, his work involved making PowerPoints, doing math and looking at databases.

• Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. Buttigieg said he’s ultimately unsure if his work, which focused on overhead expenditures such as rent and utilities, led the insurance company to cut jobs. He was moved off the assignment years before the provider started a round of layoffs in 2009. “I don’t know what the conclusions were or what it led to. So it’s tough for me to say,” he told The Atlantic.
• Canadian grocery chain Loblaw’s. The campaign said he was brought on to figure out how price cuts would affect the chain’s bottom line.
• Best Buy. Buttigieg said he “investigated opportunities for selling more energy-efficient home products in their stores.”
• The Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy. Buttigieg worked on a project co-sponsored by several groups looking at how the U.S. could become more energy efficient. The project ended with a report, published here, about the issue.
• The Energy Foundation. Buttigieg worked on researching “opportunities” in energy efficiency and renewable energy.
• The Department of Defense. Buttigieg said he looked to increase “employment and entrepreneurship” in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• The U.S. Postal Service. Buttigieg analyzed potential new sources of revenue for the Postal Service could get new streams of revenue.

Crucial quote: “It’s a place that is as amoral as the American business community in general, or at least the corporate community, can be. And that’s one of the problems with it,” Buttigieg told The Atlantic. “I never worked or was asked to work on things that I had a problem with, but it’s a place that I think, like any other law firm or firms that deal with companies, just thinks about client work and doesn’t always think about the bigger implications.”

News peg: In response to criticism about not revealing the nature of his work at McKinsey, Buttigieg’s campaign had been saying for weeks that he couldn’t speak about his tenure until the firm released him from a non-disclosure agreement. McKinsey announced it had gotten permission from each client to have their names disclosed on Monday. 

Key background: Senator Elizabeth Warren and Buttigieg have been battling over campaign transparency in recent weeks, resulting in tit-for-tat releases of information about their careers before office. After Warren hammered Buttigieg for not opening his fundraisers up to the press or releasing information about Mckinsey, Buttigieg called on the Massachusetts senator to release more years of her tax returns. Warren then published a detailed accounting of her past legal work. And Buttigieg, too, announced Monday he would let reporters attend fundraisers.