motherjones--2020-07-21--Trump’s New Census Directive Is Almost Certainly Unconstitutional

President Trump issued a memorandum on Tuesday attempting to prevent undocumented immigrants from being counted when determining congressional representation based on the 2020 census .
The directive , issued to the secretary of commerce , who oversees the Census Bureau , is almost certainly unconstitutional .
The census is constitutionally mandated to count all people—regardless of citizenship or legal status—and the 14th Amendment requires that “ representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers , counting the whole number of persons in each state.
” The new memo claims that “ the Constitution does not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the apportionment base , ” but the language of the 14th Amendment has long been interpreted by the courts as requiring the counting of all individuals , including those who are undocumented , for purposes of congressional representation .
And Congress , not the president , has final say over the conduct of the census .
The ACLU has already said it will challenge the new order in court .
The memo is a new attempt to exclude immigrant communities from counting in the census , after the Supreme Court struck down @ @ @ @ @ @ @ add a question about US citizenship to the census in June 2019 .
Removing undocumented immigrants from the census process—either by scaring them away from filling out the 2020 census or by excluding them from the redistricting process—would shift economic and political power to whiter and more Republican areas that have fewer immigrants and people of color .
The census determines how $ 1.2 trillion in federal funding is allocated and how political distracts are drawn for the next decade .
The order also goes against the positions of Trump ’ s own @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in federal court in 2018 trying to prevent undocumented immigrants from being counted in congressional apportionment , and the Justice Department intervened against the state , arguing that the case should be dismissed .
Even before the new executive order , the Trump administration was trying to exclude immigrant communities from counting toward political representation .
After the Supreme Court blocked the citizenship question , Trump issued a separate executive order in July 2019 authorizing the Census Bureau to produce citizenship information based on government records , which states could then use to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ voters when new state legislative districts are drawn in 2021 .
As I reported in the January/February edition of Mother Jones , such a move would exclude immigrants and children from counting toward state legislative apportionment , dramatically shifting power to the GOP : Using the voting-eligible population as the metric for reapportionment could lead to half of all state legislative districts in the country being redrawn .
Those new districts would exclude up to 55 percent of Latinos , 45 percent of Asian Americans , and 30 percent of African Americans from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of white people , according to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights .
As the group argued in a legal filing in 2015 , “ This would amount to a massive shift in political power away from groups that are already disadvantaged in the political process and further concentrate power in the hands of a white plurality that does not adequately represent the full diversity of the total population.
” But while states may have leeway in drawing state legislative districts , the law is quite clear that congressional districts must @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seems less like a good-faith effort to change the law and more like yet another attempt to manipulate the census to benefit GOP interests and maintain white control over the political process .

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President Trump issued a memorandum on Tuesday attempting to prevent undocumented immigrants from being counted when determining congressional representation based on the 2020 census.
The directive, issued to the secretary of commerce, who oversees the Census Bureau, is almost certainly unconstitutional. The census is constitutionally mandated to count all people—regardless of citizenship or legal status—and the 14th Amendment requires that “representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state.”
The new memo claims that “the Constitution does not specifically define which persons must be included in the apportionment base,” but the language of the 14th Amendment has long been interpreted by the courts as requiring the counting of all individuals, including those who are undocumented, for purposes of congressional representation. And Congress, not the president, has final say over the conduct of the census. The ACLU has already said it will challenge the new order in court.
The memo is a new attempt to exclude immigrant communities from counting in the census, after the Supreme Court struck down the Trump administration’s attempt to add a question about US citizenship to the census in June 2019. Removing undocumented immigrants from the census process—either by scaring them away from filling out the 2020 census or by excluding them from the redistricting process—would shift economic and political power to whiter and more Republican areas that have fewer immigrants and people of color. The census determines how $1.2 trillion in federal funding is allocated and how political distracts are drawn for the next decade.
The order also goes against the positions of Trump’s own Justice Department. Alabama filed a lawsuit in federal court in 2018 trying to prevent undocumented immigrants from being counted in congressional apportionment, and the Justice Department intervened against the state, arguing that the case should be dismissed.
Even before the new executive order, the Trump administration was trying to exclude immigrant communities from counting toward political representation. After the Supreme Court blocked the citizenship question, Trump issued a separate executive order in July 2019 authorizing the Census Bureau to produce citizenship information based on government records, which states could then use to exclude those who aren’t eligible voters when new state legislative districts are drawn in 2021.
As I reported in the January/February edition of Mother Jones, such a move would exclude immigrants and children from counting toward state legislative apportionment, dramatically shifting power to the GOP:
Using the voting-eligible population as the metric for reapportionment could lead to half of all state legislative districts in the country being redrawn. Those new districts would exclude up to 55 percent of Latinos, 45 percent of Asian Americans, and 30 percent of African Americans from being counted as constituents—compared to 21 percent of white people, according to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. As the group argued in a legal filing in 2015, “This would amount to a massive shift in political power away from groups that are already disadvantaged in the political process and further concentrate power in the hands of a white plurality that does not adequately represent the full diversity of the total population.”
But while states may have leeway in drawing state legislative districts, the law is quite clear that congressional districts must count everyone. Trump’s move seems less like a good-faith effort to change the law and more like yet another attempt to manipulate the census to benefit GOP interests and maintain white control over the political process.


motherjones--2020-07-21--7 Detainees Sued ICE. Then They Were Transferred to a Notorious Alabama Jail.

On June 29 , Stephen Brown was woken up around 4 a.m. and told that he was about to be moved from the jail in Clinton County , Pennsylvania .
He didn ’ t know where he was heading .
Brown , who came to the United States from Jamaica as a teenager 40 years ago , learned that six other immigrant detainees were being transferred from the jail .
He realized that the seven of them had something in common : They were all suing Immigration and Customs Enforcement .
Over the next 24 hours , they were loaded @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a plane to Texas and then Louisiana , and a bus to Alabama , according to a sworn declaration Brown submitted in federal court this month—all of which put them in close quarters with each other and with guards just as the number of COVID-19 cases nationwide was spiking .
The seven men ended up an hour northeast of Birmingham at the Etowah County jail , which now has 20 active COVID-19 cases , according to ICE ’ s website .
The Pennsylvania jail they left has none .
Eunice Cho , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Civil Liberties Union , which is representing Brown in his suit , says ICE has long used transfers to the Deep South as a form of retaliation and to get people under the jurisdiction of conservative judges .
What ’ s new is that those transfers now mean potentially exposing people like Brown , who has high blood pressure , to the virus that led them to sue for their release in the first place .
They also risk spreading COVID-19 between detention centers .
“ We ’ re seeing ICE transfer people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ says .
“ This , of course , is not a new thing .
ICE has done this for years before COVID broke out .
But in light of the COVID pandemic , the risks to people because of transfer are even more heightened.
” An ICE spokesperson declined to comment .
But in response to another recent ACLU lawsuit , ICE denied allegations that it transferred people from Massachusetts to Etowah as retaliation for suing the agency .
Brown ended up in ICE custody after pleading guilty to an attempted heroin distribution @ @ @ @ @ @ @ federal prison , according to federal court records .
An immigration judge ordered him to be deported this year , though Brown , a US Army veteran , is now appealing that decision .
Neither the ACLU nor Brown ’ s immigration attorney had a chance to stop his transfer because they weren ’ t notified .
The ACLU is demanding that ICE release Brown or safely return him to Clinton County , where he would be able to meet with his immigration attorney .
In addition to Brown , the ACLU is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to COVID-19 and seeking release from three Pennsylvania immigration detention centers .
Cho says Brown is the only plaintiff in the case who has been transferred out of the state .
The other six detainees who were transferred , who were among dozens of people at Clinton County suing ICE without an attorney as part of a different lawsuit , had all taken part in a brief hunger strike at Clinton a few days before the transfer , according to Brown ’ s declaration .
The ACLU argues in its lawsuit that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ jail roster shows that all six remain at Etowah .
The transfer could make it harder for the six men to secure improved detention conditions .
Their lawsuit focuses on conditions at the Clinton County jail .
Transfers cause claims to become moot , or no longer legally relevant , when a lawsuit challenges conditions at a specific jail , Cho explains .
If the six men filed a new lawsuit to demand better treatment at Etowah , ICE could transfer them again or choose to fight the case in the conservative Northern @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Bakhodir Madjitov , an Uzbeki asylum seeker who has high blood pressure and a heart condition , was one of 19 medically vulnerable people who sued to be released from Etowah to protect him from COVID-19 .
The complaint filed in the Northern District of Alabama stated that Etowah had responded to the pandemic by moving more than 100 ICE detainees into one unit of the jail , where they were often in close proximity to each other in common areas .
Instead of clamping down on the spread of the virus by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the lawsuits states , the jail purchased a “ fogger ” machine to spray cleaning chemicals , even though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn ’ t recommend the practice .
Judge R. David Proctor , a George W. Bush appointee , ruled against releasing Madjitov and his fellow plaintiffs in May .
With only one COVID-19 case among Etowah ICE detainees at the time , Proctor argued that it was hard to determine whether they would be safer inside or outside the jail .
Madjitov , who is married @ @ @ @ @ @ @ young boys , told me last week that he was moved to isolation cell at Etowah on July 6 after coughing and experiencing body aches , and a few days later he tested positive for COVID-19 .
Most of the people in his unit had been sick , but many avoided getting tested because they didn ’ t want to be moved to solitary confinement , Madjitov said .
He believed the outbreak had been caused by ICE transferring people to Etowah from a Massachusetts county jail in June .
One of those @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a one-week quarantine , he said .
Etowah , which did not respond to a request for comment , has long been criticized by immigrant advocates for lacking basic amenities like an outdoor recreation area , but it ’ s been a boon to the local economy .
After ICE decided against ending its contract with Etowah in 2011 , the local paper wrote , “ It had to be like Christmas , New Year ’ s , the Fourth of July and a whole bunch of birthdays rolled into one when Etowah @ @ @ @ @ @ @ telling them U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had decided to keep more than 300 detainees in the Etowah County Detention Center.
” A 2018 AL.com investigation found that the local sheriff had bought a $ 740,000 beach house after pocketing more than $ 750,000 in jail food funds .
The following year , a new sheriff invited the television station A & E to send innocent people into the jail to be undercover inmates on a reality show .
Brown wrote in his declaration that Etowah seemed worse than Clinton County and that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : There were about 25 guys in the intake cell .
It was impossible to social distance there—I was sitting right next to people .
Some of them were laying on the ground—including me , because I was tired and wanted to sleep .
On the ground , we were laying right next to each other .
It smelled like pee on the ground too where we were laying .
It was really filthy .
I had to wait about 12 to 13 hours until was processed .
I saw the intake people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not consistently wearing them .
Around 4:00 or 5:00am we were finally taken [ to ] the quarantine block .
Brown ’ s daughter , Britney , a rising senior at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City , still hopes that her dad will be able to attend her graduation next year .
“ America was built off the backs of immigrants , ” she said .
“ Why do these people have to be treated this way ?
I don ’ t understand .
It ’ s just disgusting @ @ @ @ @

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On June 29, Stephen Brown was woken up around 4 a.m. and told that he was about to be moved from the jail in Clinton County, Pennsylvania. He didn’t know where he was heading. Brown, who came to the United States from Jamaica as a teenager 40 years ago, learned that six other immigrant detainees were being transferred from the jail. He realized that the seven of them had something in common: They were all suing Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Over the next 24 hours, they were loaded into a van to cross through Pennsylvania, a plane to Texas and then Louisiana, and a bus to Alabama, according to a sworn declaration Brown submitted in federal court this month—all of which put them in close quarters with each other and with guards just as the number of COVID-19 cases nationwide was spiking. The seven men ended up an hour northeast of Birmingham at the Etowah County jail, which now has 20 active COVID-19 cases, according to ICE’s website. The Pennsylvania jail they left has none.
Eunice Cho, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing Brown in his suit, says ICE has long used transfers to the Deep South as a form of retaliation and to get people under the jurisdiction of conservative judges. What’s new is that those transfers now mean potentially exposing people like Brown, who has high blood pressure, to the virus that led them to sue for their release in the first place. They also risk spreading COVID-19 between detention centers.
“We’re seeing ICE transfer people in a retaliatory manner,” Cho says. “This, of course, is not a new thing. ICE has done this for years before COVID broke out. But in light of the COVID pandemic, the risks to people because of transfer are even more heightened.”
An ICE spokesperson declined to comment. But in response to another recent ACLU lawsuit, ICE denied allegations that it transferred people from Massachusetts to Etowah as retaliation for suing the agency.
Brown ended up in ICE custody after pleading guilty to an attempted heroin distribution charge in 2016 and serving time in federal prison, according to federal court records. An immigration judge ordered him to be deported this year, though Brown, a US Army veteran, is now appealing that decision.
“We’re seeing ICE transfer people in a retaliatory manner,” says ACLU attorney Eunice Cho.
Neither the ACLU nor Brown’s immigration attorney had a chance to stop his transfer because they weren’t notified. The ACLU is demanding that ICE release Brown or safely return him to Clinton County, where he would be able to meet with his immigration attorney.
In addition to Brown, the ACLU is representing 10 other detainees who are vulnerable to COVID-19 and seeking release from three Pennsylvania immigration detention centers. Cho says Brown is the only plaintiff in the case who has been transferred out of the state.
The other six detainees who were transferred, who were among dozens of people at Clinton County suing ICE without an attorney as part of a different lawsuit, had all taken part in a brief hunger strike at Clinton a few days before the transfer, according to Brown’s declaration. The ACLU argues in its lawsuit that the transfer was “blatant retaliation.” A jail roster shows that all six remain at Etowah.
The transfer could make it harder for the six men to secure improved detention conditions. Their lawsuit focuses on conditions at the Clinton County jail. Transfers cause claims to become moot, or no longer legally relevant, when a lawsuit challenges conditions at a specific jail, Cho explains. If the six men filed a new lawsuit to demand better treatment at Etowah, ICE could transfer them again or choose to fight the case in the conservative Northern District of Alabama.
In April, Bakhodir Madjitov, an Uzbeki asylum seeker who has high blood pressure and a heart condition, was one of 19 medically vulnerable people who sued to be released from Etowah to protect him from COVID-19. The complaint filed in the Northern District of Alabama stated that Etowah had responded to the pandemic by moving more than 100 ICE detainees into one unit of the jail, where they were often in close proximity to each other in common areas. Instead of clamping down on the spread of the virus by enabling social distancing and avoiding new transfers, the lawsuits states, the jail purchased a “fogger” machine to spray cleaning chemicals, even though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn’t recommend the practice.
Judge R. David Proctor, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled against releasing Madjitov and his fellow plaintiffs in May. With only one COVID-19 case among Etowah ICE detainees at the time, Proctor argued that it was hard to determine whether they would be safer inside or outside the jail.
Madjitov, who is married to a US citizen and has three young boys, told me last week that he was moved to isolation cell at Etowah on July 6 after coughing and experiencing body aches, and a few days later he tested positive for COVID-19. Most of the people in his unit had been sick, but many avoided getting tested because they didn’t want to be moved to solitary confinement, Madjitov said. He believed the outbreak had been caused by ICE transferring people to Etowah from a Massachusetts county jail in June. One of those people became Madjitov’s cellmate after a one-week quarantine, he said.
Etowah, which did not respond to a request for comment, has long been criticized by immigrant advocates for lacking basic amenities like an outdoor recreation area, but it’s been a boon to the local economy. After ICE decided against ending its contract with Etowah in 2011, the local paper wrote, “It had to be like Christmas, New Year’s, the Fourth of July and a whole bunch of birthdays rolled into one when Etowah County officials got ‘the call’ telling them U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had decided to keep more than 300 detainees in the Etowah County Detention Center.” A 2018 AL.com investigation found that the local sheriff had bought a $740,000 beach house after pocketing more than $750,000 in jail food funds. The following year, a new sheriff invited the television station A&E to send innocent people into the jail to be undercover inmates on a reality show.
Brown wrote in his declaration that Etowah seemed worse than Clinton County and that the intake process had been particularly bad:
There were about 25 guys in the intake cell. It was impossible to social distance there—I was sitting right next to people. Some of them were laying on the ground—including me, because I was tired and wanted to sleep. On the ground, we were laying right next to each other. It smelled like pee on the ground too where we were laying. It was really filthy. I had to wait about 12 to 13 hours until was processed. I saw the intake people take on and off their masks—they were not consistently wearing them. Around 4:00 or 5:00am we were finally taken [to] the quarantine block.
Brown’s daughter, Britney, a rising senior at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, still hopes that her dad will be able to attend her graduation next year. “America was built off the backs of immigrants,” she said. “Why do these people have to be treated this way? I don’t understand. It’s just disgusting in my opinion.”


motherjones--2020-07-22--How McKinsey Is Making $100 Million (and Counting) Advising on the Government’s Bumbling Coronavirus

How McKinsey Is Making $100 Million (and Counting) Advising on the Government’s Bumbling Coronavirus Response

This story was published originally by ProPublica , a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power .
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In the middle of March , as the coronavirus pandemic was shutting down the country , McKinsey & Co. , the giant management consulting firm , saw opportunity .
The firm sprang into sales mode , deploying its partners across the country to seek contracts with federal agencies , state governments and city halls .
Government organizations had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and there was a lot of money to be made advising them on how to address it .
That month , a partner in McKinsey ’ s Washington , D.C. , office , Scott Blackburn , got in touch with an old colleague .
Deb Kramer had just been promoted to become an acting assistant undersecretary at the Department of Veterans Affairs , where Blackburn , whom McKinsey declined to make available for an interview , had held senior roles between 2014 and 2018 .
During that period , the two had overseen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ MyVA , ” a project McKinsey had worked on as well .
Blackburn had worked at McKinsey before going to the VA , and he returned to the firm afterward .
He and Kramer were in touch repeatedly in the middle of March , according to a person familiar with the exchanges .
On March 19 , Kramer made a highly unusual request : The VA , she said , needed to hire McKinsey within 24 hours .
The VA runs a sprawling health care system that serves 9 million veterans , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ chronic health problems , and typically takes many months to solicit and accept bids and vet bidders for a contract .
The health system ’ s leadership wanted to sign a multimillion-dollar contract with McKinsey to spend up to a year consulting on “ all aspects ” of the system ’ s operations during the COVID-19 pandemic , Kramer told a VA contracting officer , Nathan Pennington .
Pennington memorialized parts of the exchange in a public contracting document .
“ There is no time to spare , ” the contracting document stated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lack of situational awareness down to the community level , and the inability to model scenarios and test alternative courses of action , increases the risk to the citizens of this nation , to include Veterans and our own employees.
” The VA , the document observed , needed help with “ life-and-death decision-making today.
” The exigent circumstances left no time to seek competing bids or to fully vet McKinsey ’ s proposal , Kramer argued .
It was the only contractor she and her colleagues were aware of that could provide @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” time the VA couldn ’ t afford .
Pennington conducted no market research and only a minimal review of the cost , “ as there was no time , ” he wrote .
Kramer approved the $ 12 million price tag .
The contract was signed on March 20 .
That would turn out to be just a down payment for McKinsey .
Ten days later , the Defense Health Agency was added to the VA contract , upping its value to $ 22.5 million , and the week after , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ contract .
The firm ’ s assignment for the Air Force was to serve on a task force developing a strategy to get defense contractors , many of them McKinsey clients , to produce medical supplies during the pandemic .
To justify the $ 12 million value of that contract , an Air Force contracting document cited what the VA had agreed to pay McKinsey .
It did not mention the VA price tag ’ s largely unvetted nature .
Finally , in early May , the DHA expanded the scope of McKinsey @ @ @ @ @ @ @ contract worth up to $ 6.1 million .
A VA spokeswoman , Christina Noel , said that the agency “ adhered to all federal contracting laws ” in hiring McKinsey and that “ no-bid contracts can help provide VA the flexibility needed during this national emergency to deliver the services required to support clinical needs and save lives.
” A DHA spokesman , Richard Breen , said McKinsey had “ expertise needed and an existing contract with [ the VA ] for COVID-19 modeling support with a separate and distinct scope.
” An @ @ @ @ @ @ @ emailed questions .
In a matter of weeks , McKinsey had extracted a total of $ 40.6 million in no-bid contracts out of its initial agreement with one federal agency .
The firm has continued to scoop up COVID-19-related contracts for various governments since then .
Altogether , in the four months since the pandemic started , the firm has been awarded work for state , city and federal agencies worth well over $ 100 million—and counting .
Many of the most prominent government pandemic efforts have been staffed with battalions of McKinsey @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The joint coronavirus task force operating out of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Department of Health and Human Services enlisted McKinsey , on a pro bono basis , to help obtain medical supplies .
New York Gov .
Andrew Cuomo ’ s team hired McKinsey to draw on existing epidemiological models to project hospital capacity and medical supply needs .
The Food and Drug Administration retained the firm to do data analysis .
Among states , California , Illinois , Massachusetts , New Jersey , Tennessee and Virginia have worked with McKinsey @ @ @ @ @ @ @ yet available , and only some states have revealed the dollar value of their contracts .
For example , the contracts for New York and New Jersey represent a combined $ 18 million in revenue for the firm . )
Cities including Atlanta , Chicago , Los Angeles , New Orleans and St. Louis have also used the firm during the pandemic .
It ’ s too early to fully judge these engagements , but a preliminary assessment shows mixed results .
After early stumbles , New York state and New Jersey are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hand , the FEMA/HHS task force has faced harsh criticism for a slow and dysfunctional effort to procure supplies .
And project documents and interviews show that , at the VA , consultants have been slow to deliver urgently needed data .
In other places , officials have denigrated McKinsey ’ s contributions .
“ Basically , they are compiling data for us , ” a top official in Florida ’ s Miami-Dade County wrote in an internal email obtained by ProPublica .
“ And putting it in pretty formats.
” That contract @ @ @ @ @ @ @ work , with a price tag of up to $ 568,000 , and the confusing set of reopening guidelines that emerged with McKinsey ’ s help has been widely panned .
McKinsey defended its work in a written statement the firm sent in the name of Liz Hilton Segel , its managing partner for North America operations : “ Like many other companies , we chose to engage and do our part in helping governments fight this pandemic.
” The statement noted that McKinsey “ has the capabilities to support leaders and public @ @ @ @ @ @ @ economic crisis .
… We are proud of the support we have provided to public sector leaders , front line staff and those engaged in fighting this pandemic.
” Given that McKinsey consultants operate as advisers , with government officials charged with making final decisions , it can be hard to identify the firm ’ s responsibility for any given decision .
But the firm ’ s government work has been steadily rising in the wake of a multidecade hollowing out of government ( a trend McKinsey has promoted and ridden ) .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ you examine the government ’ s response to the pandemic , you ’ re likely to find McKinsey ’ s fingerprints .
Like countless organizations , McKinsey has been buffeted by the pandemic , encountering turbulence and uncertainty .
For starters , the sputtering economy put many of its corporate clients under duress .
Then there was a bevy of self-inflicted problems .
McKinsey ’ s bankruptcy practice , which would normally thrive during hard times , has been under a “ black cloud , ” as a lawyer representing McKinsey put it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The firm ’ s practice has been dogged by a federal investigation into potentially criminal self-dealing and tied up in litigation with the founder of a rival firm over whether McKinsey properly disclosed possible conflicts of interest .
( “ McKinsey ’ s bankruptcy disclosure practices have always complied with the law , ” Gary Pinkus , chairman of the firm ’ s North America operations , said in a written statement . )
More broadly McKinsey has seen its long-gilded reputation tarnished in recent years as government projects come under critical scrutiny @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal , have investigated a variety of ethically and legally dubious actions .
That included helping the Trump administration execute exclusionary immigration policies , corruption allegations against local companies McKinsey worked alongside in Mongolia and South Africa , and a pattern of hiring the children of high-ranking officials in Saudi Arabia .
In each instance , McKinsey has denied wrongdoing .
With $ 10 billion in annual revenues , the firm is now as big or bigger than many of its clients and has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In April , McKinsey was penalized for running afoul of the federal government .
The General Services Administration , which oversees federal procurement , canceled two government-wide contracts , one of which had earned the firm nearly $ 1 billion between 2006 and 2019 .
In a report issued earlier by GSA ’ s internal watchdog , investigators revealed that McKinsey had refused to comply with an audit .
Instead , the firm went over the head of a contracting officer and found a GSA supervisor who was willing to accommodate the firm @ @ @ @ @ @ @ improperly inflate the contract prices , the investigators found , part of a troubling pattern of favoritism the supervisor showed toward McKinsey .
For nine months , GSA negotiated with McKinsey to lower its rates .
McKinsey ’ s intransigence ultimately led officials to see cancellation as the best option , according to a statement from a senior GSA official , Julie Dunne .
( DJ Carella , a spokesman for McKinsey , which denied wrongdoing , said in a statement , “ We are disappointed with GSA ’ s decision and look @ @ @ @ @ @ @ schedule in the future.
” ) The fallout devastated the firm ’ s U.S. public-sector practice , current and former consultants say .
“ The public-sector practice was already underutilized after the [ GSA ] report , ” one of them said .
“ And then it just stopped.
” For McKinsey , the pandemic provided a new opportunity to regain its foothold in the federal government .
Coordination from the White House was inconsistent at best , and many state , federal and city agencies were already short staffed .
Years of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ left them dependent on outside contractors even in ordinary circumstances .
So dependent that McKinsey consultants on the FEMA-HHS task force ended up working in the procurement process , according to a federal official briefed on the task force ’ s work .
That was unfamiliar terrain for the McKinseyites .
Crucial medical supplies from surgical masks to ventilators were scarce and the government had solicited offers from any vendors claiming to have access to the necessary supplies .
As the offers came in , McKinsey consultants were among the task force members @ @ @ @ @ @ @ them to federal procurement officers , the federal official said .
Carella , the McKinsey spokesman , said the firm “ did not ‘ vet ’ offers ” of “ PPE , ventilators or medical supplies , ” but rather “ helped the client assess the availability of life-saving equipment , ” without making any decisions about what to pass on to contracting officers .
A FEMA spokeswoman , Janet Montesi , put it differently .
The task force “ vetted hundreds of leads for PPE that were passed along to FEMA and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ statement .
Responding to questions about McKinsey ’ s pro bono work for the task force , Montesi added that “ the volunteers played an important role , ” but career contracting officers followed legally required processes before entering into any contracts .
McKinsey consultants struggled to understand the complicated government procurement rules , according to the federal official .
The career procurement officers found themselves rejecting what seemed like every other offer forwarded by the consultants and other task force members , because they ran afoul of various rules .
“ Even @ @ @ @ @ @ @ problems quickly , you still have to stop doing your regular procurement work , ” the official said .
“ That delays the whole process.
” In the weeks just after McKinsey signed its $ 12 million contract with the VA , Richard Stone , who runs the agency ’ s health care system , and his aides crowed about hiring the consultancy , according to federal officials who spoke with them at the time .
Stone , a medical doctor who had worked as a consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton , seemed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The VA , he told one of the federal officials , was now “ better prepared because we have private-sector capability.
” His enthusiasm didn ’ t last long .
Kramer had insisted that only McKinsey could meet the VA ’ s needs immediately .
Yet more than three weeks after the consultants started , they still hadn ’ t provided data and analysis on key parts of the VA health system .
One of McKinsey ’ s daily PowerPoint updates for VA officials , dated from mid-April and obtained by ProPublica @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to analyze the pandemic ’ s effect on two types of health care facilities most vulnerable to the coronavirus : VA-run nursing homes and VA facilities in rural parts of the country .
The rural facilities alone serve 2.7 million veterans—more than a quarter of the veterans enrolled in the VA—and half of them are over 65 years old .
These analyses , notes one of McKinsey ’ s slides , would be added “ in the coming days.
” Also absent was data on medical supply capacity across the VA health system @ @ @ @ @ @ @ those facing some of the country ’ s worst outbreaks at the time , like New York City , Detroit and New Orleans—contained a placeholder for the missing data : “ To be incorporated over the next few days.
” ( Hilton Segel , the McKinsey partner , seemed to blame the VA. “ We conducted the analyses as the data was available so the client could make decisions in real time with the best available information , ” she said in a written statement . )
Meanwhile , VA nurses and other @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about widespread shortfalls in personal protective equipment and other materials .
With a complete void in McKinsey ’ s slides where the relevant data should ’ ve been , VA officials disputed that there was a supply shortfall , delaying the agency ’ s response .
It wasn ’ t until late April that Stone acknowledged in an interview with The Washington Post that medical supplies were at “ austerity levels ” at some VA hospitals .
Noel , the VA spokeswoman , defended the consultants ’ work .
“ McKinsey & Company @ @ @ @ @ @ @ contract , providing timely , critical intelligence about capacity and utilization rates of non-VA health care facilities and other analytical services during VA ’ s response to COVID-19 .
This is a capability that VA does not have , and these services are vital.
” At congressional oversight hearings in recent weeks , questions about the sufficiency of the VA ’ s medical supply stores have persisted .
Meanwhile , infections have been rising sharply in its facilities .
A month ago , there were about 1,685 VA patients and employees with active @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , that number had jumped to 5,887 .
McKinsey ’ s success cultivating government clients during the pandemic is , in many respects , the realization of a 70-year mission .
The 1950s were when the firm began pushing the view that businessmen should supplant civil servants , particularly in the management positions tasked with putting policy into practice .
The pitch was self-interested but well calibrated to appeal during the Cold War : The “ free enterprise society ” of the U.S. “ dictates that industry should be given as extensive a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in a 1960 report to the fledgling National Aeronautics and Space Administration .
NASA soon relied almost exclusively on outside contractors .
By 1961 , almost $ 850 million of the agency ’ s $ 1 billion budget went to aerospace contractors .
NASA would become the template for “ the emerging ‘ hollowed-out ’ structure of the contractor state , ” the historian Christopher McKenna wrote in The World ’ s Newest Profession , his 2006 book on the consulting industry .
Over decades , McKinsey ’ s approach became self-reinforcing .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ civil service , politicians who advocate small government got the dysfunctional bureaucracy they had complained about all along , which helped them justify dismantling it further .
The upshot of this process can be seen throughout McKinsey ’ s coronavirus consulting .
Stone , the VA health system head , thought a consulting firm made the VA better prepared .
The Defense Health Agency provided “ no staff support ” for the head of its COVID-19 task force , according to a contracting document , prompting the agency to outsource that work to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ County had a more jaundiced view .
She wrote in an email to a colleague that the firm ’ s consultants were merely “ doing the research I am too burned out at this point to do ” —adding that she was “ quite flattered ” that it took an entire team of high-priced consultants to replace her .
McKinsey ’ s business model also generates a second round of revenue from its government work : The firm effectively sells data it obtains from one government project to other agencies .
McKinsey generally @ @ @ @ @ @ @ product from its engagements , so future consulting teams can get a head start on similar projects .
Ordinarily , the federal government might be expected to put together that type of clearinghouse and share it with state and city governments free of charge .
But in the absence of such a clearinghouse , McKinsey has something state , city and federal government agencies need , and access to government data has formed a core part of McKinsey ’ s COVID-19 pitch .
McKinsey ’ s data was one of the factors cited @ @ @ @ @ @ @ firm within 24 hours .
As a contracting document explained : The firm “ already possessed an immense amount of both global and community epidemiological data on COVID-19 ” the VA didn ’ t otherwise have access to .
McKinsey customers pay not only in cash but by adding new data that the firm will be able to sell to the next customer .
Hiring McKinsey is a famously expensive proposition , even when compared with its leading competitors .
A single junior consultant—typically a recent college or business school graduate—runs clients $ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ million annually .
For $ 160,000 per week , you get two consultants , the second one mid-level .
To alleviate the sticker shock , McKinsey has lately offered a coronavirus discount .
In project proposals , the firm branded these COVID-19 rates “ philanthropic prices.
” The reduced rates ranged from $ 125,000 per week ( for the two-consultant package ) to $ 178,000 ( for five ) .
In a separate column , a McKinsey pricing sheet played up pandemic-only add-ons , whose language read like action-figure packaging : “ COVID @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” In her statement , Hilton Segal , the McKinsey partner , noted that , when the pandemic began , the firm reduced its fees to the public sector “ as part of our commitment to help .
We made our intellectual property and capabilities available widely , including by setting up a COVID Response Center that provides free public access to insights from our research .
Thousands of McKinsey colleagues stepped up to help—through client work , pro bono service , developing and publishing insights on the pandemic , and more.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ County suggests some clients get little in return , according to interviews , as well as emails and project documents obtained by ProPublica through a public records request .
On a Friday in late April , Jennifer Moon received an email from a senior McKinsey partner .
Moon is the budget director and a deputy mayor for Miami-Dade , and her boss , the mayor , wanted to hire McKinsey to help finalize guidelines for reopening the county ’ s economy , which he had shuttered over a month earlier .
It fell @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In his email , the McKinsey partner , Andre Dua , directed Moon ’ s attention to a pricing sheet listing what he called “ our special Covid 19 pricing ” and outlined the anticipated scope of the firm ’ s work .
The proposal consisted largely of consulting buzzwords : variations on the word “ analysis ” ; offers of “ best practices , ” “ perspectives ” and “ decision-support.
” Moon could read between the lines , and she discerned a familiar set of tasks .
“ Here ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” she wrote , forwarding one of Dua ’ s emails to the county lawyer reviewing McKinsey ’ s contract .
“ Apparently , it takes 5 people with staff support to do what I ’ ve been doing myself.
” The $ 142,000 per week it would cost was more than the combined annual salaries of the two staffers who had been helping Moon prepare the reopening plan—very ably , she noted in an email .
The reopening plan ’ s publication was imminent , and Moon didn ’ t expect @ @ @ @ @ @ @ month .
But as contract negotiations unfolded , Dua and Geoff Bradford , a McKinsey contract manager , resisted the county ’ s attempts to limit the contract ’ s duration to four weeks .
They wanted to keep the agreement as open-ended as possible to “ provide flexibility.
” What they meant by that , they explained in a series of emails , was the flexibility to expand the scope of the project and keep McKinsey ’ s consultants around longer .
Dua and Bradford also resisted county officials ’ efforts to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ policy of refusing to reveal the names of its clients and demanding that clients likewise not reveal that they ’ ve retained McKinsey , unless they ’ re legally obligated to .
Amid the pandemic , the firm has taken confidentiality a step further .
McKinsey ’ s COVID-19 contracts still require that clients not disclose that they ’ ve hired the consultancy .
But many of them now allow McKinsey to unilaterally “ disclose that we have been retained by the Client and a general description of the Services.
” The firm @ @ @ @ @ @ @ market its government work online .
When the officials in Miami-Dade objected to the confidentiality clause , Dua took a firm line : removing it “ will be a show stopper on our end.
” Eventually Bradford allowed that the firm might budge , but only a little .
McKinsey would consider letting county officials share its work product “ with specific entities , ” he wrote in a markup of McKinsey ’ s draft contract .
But only “ if we ’ re able to define those entities and can attach guardrails @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in other words , that it should decide what the government could say—and to whom—about the advice it had been given .
As the project progressed , Moon ’ s initial skepticism was borne out .
There were non-intuitive and innovative recommendations among the “ best practices ” for reopening the county .
But many of them were obvious or had already been suggested by county staffers : “ install Plexiglass barriers between cashier and customer , ” for example .
At times , it seemed as if the consultants were picking best @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reopening construction sites recommended grouping workers into teams that not only work and eat together but “ live ” and “ travel ” together .
Myriam Marquez , communications director of the mayor of Miami-Dade County , didn ’ t respond to a request for comment .
McKinsey ’ s statement noted that the firm ’ s “ work with Miami-Dade County was focused on sharing insights and observed practices from governments and businesses around the world , as leaders navigated the uncertainty of reopening major sectors of their economy.
” In mid-May @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , “ The New Normal.
” The document , which stretched to 175 pages , was widely panned for its needless complexity , which sowed confusion among the public .
The plan structured reopening around two overlapping schemes .
Five different colored “ flags ” represented different phases of reopening .
Separately , five “ archetypes ” —a McKinsey innovation , emails and project documents show—grouped industry sectors and public spaces by how much human interaction they required : “ can be performed remotely , ” “ lower proximity ” and so on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ five archetypes didn ’ t align ; one flag might cover two archetypes and vice versa .
Imagine a stoplight where shapes have been added to the usual three-color scheme—a yellow square means something different from a yellow circle , which means something different from a red circle—and you ’ ll start to get a sense for the confusion the systems provoked .
As the Miami Herald put it , echoing the local reaction in Florida-appropriate terms : “ They ’ re just like the flags that lifeguards fly on their stands at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Xavier Suarez , a longtime county commissioner and former mayor of Miami , didn ’ t see what had been gained by pulling more than half a million dollars out of the county ’ s pandemic-hit budget to hire McKinsey .
“ It just strikes me as a colossal waste of money , ” he told me .
The firm ’ s “ archetypes ” certainly hadn ’ t added anything .
“ I remember reading about archetypes in psychology when we covered Carl Jung , ” Suarez said .
“ It sounds @ @ @ @ @ @ @ —and here he paused for effect— “ sesquipedalian word a consultant would come up with to try and sound smarter than you.
” Carlos Giménez , the mayor of Miami-Dade County and a political foe of Suarez , evidently came to agree .
On June 19 , his administration quietly posted a revised version of it .
Notably scrubbed from the new “ New Normal ” : McKinsey ’ s archetypes .
As of mid-July , COVID-19 cases continued to rise in Miami-Dade .

This story was published originally by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.
In the middle of March, as the coronavirus pandemic was shutting down the country, McKinsey & Co., the giant management consulting firm, saw opportunity. The firm sprang into sales mode, deploying its partners across the country to seek contracts with federal agencies, state governments and city halls. Government organizations had been caught unprepared by the virus, and there was a lot of money to be made advising them on how to address it.
That month, a partner in McKinsey’s Washington, D.C., office, Scott Blackburn, got in touch with an old colleague. Deb Kramer had just been promoted to become an acting assistant undersecretary at the Department of Veterans Affairs, where Blackburn, whom McKinsey declined to make available for an interview, had held senior roles between 2014 and 2018. During that period, the two had overseen a major overhaul of the agency called “MyVA,” a project McKinsey had worked on as well. Blackburn had worked at McKinsey before going to the VA, and he returned to the firm afterward. He and Kramer were in touch repeatedly in the middle of March, according to a person familiar with the exchanges.
On March 19, Kramer made a highly unusual request: The VA, she said, needed to hire McKinsey within 24 hours. The VA runs a sprawling health care system that serves 9 million veterans, many of them older and plagued by chronic health problems, and typically takes many months to solicit and accept bids and vet bidders for a contract. The health system’s leadership wanted to sign a multimillion-dollar contract with McKinsey to spend up to a year consulting on “all aspects” of the system’s operations during the COVID-19 pandemic, Kramer told a VA contracting officer, Nathan Pennington. Pennington memorialized parts of the exchange in a public contracting document.
“There is no time to spare,” the contracting document stated, “every day wasted by a lack of situational awareness down to the community level, and the inability to model scenarios and test alternative courses of action, increases the risk to the citizens of this nation, to include Veterans and our own employees.” The VA, the document observed, needed help with “life-and-death decision-making today.”
The exigent circumstances left no time to seek competing bids or to fully vet McKinsey’s proposal, Kramer argued. It was the only contractor she and her colleagues were aware of that could provide the required services without needing “ramp-up” time the VA couldn’t afford. Pennington conducted no market research and only a minimal review of the cost, “as there was no time,” he wrote. Kramer approved the $12 million price tag. The contract was signed on March 20.
That would turn out to be just a down payment for McKinsey. Ten days later, the Defense Health Agency was added to the VA contract, upping its value to $22.5 million, and the week after, the Air Force hired McKinsey—also with a no-bid contract. The firm’s assignment for the Air Force was to serve on a task force developing a strategy to get defense contractors, many of them McKinsey clients, to produce medical supplies during the pandemic. To justify the $12 million value of that contract, an Air Force contracting document cited what the VA had agreed to pay McKinsey. It did not mention the VA price tag’s largely unvetted nature. Finally, in early May, the DHA expanded the scope of McKinsey’s work, signing an additional contract worth up to $6.1 million.
A VA spokeswoman, Christina Noel, said that the agency “adhered to all federal contracting laws” in hiring McKinsey and that “no-bid contracts can help provide VA the flexibility needed during this national emergency to deliver the services required to support clinical needs and save lives.” A DHA spokesman, Richard Breen, said McKinsey had “expertise needed and an existing contract with [the VA] for COVID-19 modeling support with a separate and distinct scope.” An Air Force spokesperson did not respond to emailed questions.
In a matter of weeks, McKinsey had extracted a total of $40.6 million in no-bid contracts out of its initial agreement with one federal agency. The firm has continued to scoop up COVID-19-related contracts for various governments since then. Altogether, in the four months since the pandemic started, the firm has been awarded work for state, city and federal agencies worth well over $100 million—and counting.
Many of the most prominent government pandemic efforts have been staffed with battalions of McKinsey’s trademark dark-suited young MBAs. The joint coronavirus task force operating out of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Department of Health and Human Services enlisted McKinsey, on a pro bono basis, to help obtain medical supplies. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s team hired McKinsey to draw on existing epidemiological models to project hospital capacity and medical supply needs. The Food and Drug Administration retained the firm to do data analysis.
Among states, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Tennessee and Virginia have worked with McKinsey. (Comprehensive contracting data is not yet available, and only some states have revealed the dollar value of their contracts. For example, the contracts for New York and New Jersey represent a combined $18 million in revenue for the firm.) Cities including Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans and St. Louis have also used the firm during the pandemic.
It’s too early to fully judge these engagements, but a preliminary assessment shows mixed results. After early stumbles, New York state and New Jersey are doing relatively well. On the other hand, the FEMA/HHS task force has faced harsh criticism for a slow and dysfunctional effort to procure supplies. And project documents and interviews show that, at the VA, consultants have been slow to deliver urgently needed data. In other places, officials have denigrated McKinsey’s contributions. “Basically, they are compiling data for us,” a top official in Florida’s Miami-Dade County wrote in an internal email obtained by ProPublica. “And putting it in pretty formats.” That contract was for up to a month of work, with a price tag of up to $568,000, and the confusing set of reopening guidelines that emerged with McKinsey’s help has been widely panned.
McKinsey defended its work in a written statement the firm sent in the name of Liz Hilton Segel, its managing partner for North America operations: “Like many other companies, we chose to engage and do our part in helping governments fight this pandemic.” The statement noted that McKinsey “has the capabilities to support leaders and public servants who are navigating this humanitarian and economic crisis. … We are proud of the support we have provided to public sector leaders, front line staff and those engaged in fighting this pandemic.”
Given that McKinsey consultants operate as advisers, with government officials charged with making final decisions, it can be hard to identify the firm’s responsibility for any given decision. But the firm’s government work has been steadily rising in the wake of a multidecade hollowing out of government (a trend McKinsey has promoted and ridden). Today, that increasingly means that if you examine the government’s response to the pandemic, you’re likely to find McKinsey’s fingerprints.
Like countless organizations, McKinsey has been buffeted by the pandemic, encountering turbulence and uncertainty. For starters, the sputtering economy put many of its corporate clients under duress.
Then there was a bevy of self-inflicted problems.
McKinsey’s bankruptcy practice, which would normally thrive during hard times, has been under a “black cloud,” as a lawyer representing McKinsey put it in a court hearing in April. The firm’s practice has been dogged by a federal investigation into potentially criminal self-dealing and tied up in litigation with the founder of a rival firm over whether McKinsey properly disclosed possible conflicts of interest. (“McKinsey’s bankruptcy disclosure practices have always complied with the law,” Gary Pinkus, chairman of the firm’s North America operations, said in a written statement.)
More broadly McKinsey has seen its long-gilded reputation tarnished in recent years as government projects come under critical scrutiny. Media outlets, such as ProPublica, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have investigated a variety of ethically and legally dubious actions. That included helping the Trump administration execute exclusionary immigration policies, corruption allegations against local companies McKinsey worked alongside in Mongolia and South Africa, and a pattern of hiring the children of high-ranking officials in Saudi Arabia. In each instance, McKinsey has denied wrongdoing. With $10 billion in annual revenues, the firm is now as big or bigger than many of its clients and has developed a culture that resists oversight.
In April, McKinsey was penalized for running afoul of the federal government. The General Services Administration, which oversees federal procurement, canceled two government-wide contracts, one of which had earned the firm nearly $1 billion between 2006 and 2019. In a report issued earlier by GSA’s internal watchdog, investigators revealed that McKinsey had refused to comply with an audit. Instead, the firm went over the head of a contracting officer and found a GSA supervisor who was willing to accommodate the firm. That supervisor worked with McKinsey to improperly inflate the contract prices, the investigators found, part of a troubling pattern of favoritism the supervisor showed toward McKinsey.
For nine months, GSA negotiated with McKinsey to lower its rates. McKinsey’s intransigence ultimately led officials to see cancellation as the best option, according to a statement from a senior GSA official, Julie Dunne. (DJ Carella, a spokesman for McKinsey, which denied wrongdoing, said in a statement, “We are disappointed with GSA’s decision and look forward to potentially returning to the GSA schedule in the future.”)
The fallout devastated the firm’s U.S. public-sector practice, current and former consultants say. “The public-sector practice was already underutilized after the [GSA] report,” one of them said. “And then it just stopped.”
For McKinsey, the pandemic provided a new opportunity to regain its foothold in the federal government. Coordination from the White House was inconsistent at best, and many state, federal and city agencies were already short staffed. Years of budget cuts and anti-big government policies had left them dependent on outside contractors even in ordinary circumstances.
So dependent that McKinsey consultants on the FEMA-HHS task force ended up working in the procurement process, according to a federal official briefed on the task force’s work. That was unfamiliar terrain for the McKinseyites. Crucial medical supplies from surgical masks to ventilators were scarce and the government had solicited offers from any vendors claiming to have access to the necessary supplies. As the offers came in, McKinsey consultants were among the task force members assigned to help vet them before forwarding them to federal procurement officers, the federal official said. Carella, the McKinsey spokesman, said the firm “did not ‘vet’ offers” of “PPE, ventilators or medical supplies,” but rather “helped the client assess the availability of life-saving equipment,” without making any decisions about what to pass on to contracting officers.
A FEMA spokeswoman, Janet Montesi, put it differently. The task force “vetted hundreds of leads for PPE that were passed along to FEMA and HHS,” she said in a statement. Responding to questions about McKinsey’s pro bono work for the task force, Montesi added that “the volunteers played an important role,” but career contracting officers followed legally required processes before entering into any contracts.
McKinsey consultants struggled to understand the complicated government procurement rules, according to the federal official. The career procurement officers found themselves rejecting what seemed like every other offer forwarded by the consultants and other task force members, because they ran afoul of various rules. “Even though a career employee can spot the problems quickly, you still have to stop doing your regular procurement work,” the official said. “That delays the whole process.”
In the weeks just after McKinsey signed its $12 million contract with the VA, Richard Stone, who runs the agency’s health care system, and his aides crowed about hiring the consultancy, according to federal officials who spoke with them at the time. Stone, a medical doctor who had worked as a consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, seemed to lack faith in his own staff. The VA, he told one of the federal officials, was now “better prepared because we have private-sector capability.”
His enthusiasm didn’t last long. Kramer had insisted that only McKinsey could meet the VA’s needs immediately. Yet more than three weeks after the consultants started, they still hadn’t provided data and analysis on key parts of the VA health system. One of McKinsey’s daily PowerPoint updates for VA officials, dated from mid-April and obtained by ProPublica, shows that the consultants had yet to analyze the pandemic’s effect on two types of health care facilities most vulnerable to the coronavirus: VA-run nursing homes and VA facilities in rural parts of the country. The rural facilities alone serve 2.7 million veterans—more than a quarter of the veterans enrolled in the VA—and half of them are over 65 years old. These analyses, notes one of McKinsey’s slides, would be added “in the coming days.”
Also absent was data on medical supply capacity across the VA health system. Slides assessing conditions in numerous regions—including those facing some of the country’s worst outbreaks at the time, like New York City, Detroit and New Orleans—contained a placeholder for the missing data: “To be incorporated over the next few days.” (Hilton Segel, the McKinsey partner, seemed to blame the VA. “We conducted the analyses as the data was available so the client could make decisions in real time with the best available information,” she said in a written statement.)
Meanwhile, VA nurses and other front-line care providers were sounding the alarm about widespread shortfalls in personal protective equipment and other materials. With a complete void in McKinsey’s slides where the relevant data should’ve been, VA officials disputed that there was a supply shortfall, delaying the agency’s response. It wasn’t until late April that Stone acknowledged in an interview with The Washington Post that medical supplies were at “austerity levels” at some VA hospitals.
Noel, the VA spokeswoman, defended the consultants’ work. “McKinsey & Company is fully fulfilling the terms of its contract, providing timely, critical intelligence about capacity and utilization rates of non-VA health care facilities and other analytical services during VA’s response to COVID-19. This is a capability that VA does not have, and these services are vital.”
At congressional oversight hearings in recent weeks, questions about the sufficiency of the VA’s medical supply stores have persisted. Meanwhile, infections have been rising sharply in its facilities. A month ago, there were about 1,685 VA patients and employees with active COVID-19 cases. As of July 14, that number had jumped to 5,887.
McKinsey’s success cultivating government clients during the pandemic is, in many respects, the realization of a 70-year mission. The 1950s were when the firm began pushing the view that businessmen should supplant civil servants, particularly in the management positions tasked with putting policy into practice. The pitch was self-interested but well calibrated to appeal during the Cold War: The “free enterprise society” of the U.S. “dictates that industry should be given as extensive a role as possible,” McKinsey wrote in a 1960 report to the fledgling National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
NASA soon relied almost exclusively on outside contractors. By 1961, almost $850 million of the agency’s $1 billion budget went to aerospace contractors. NASA would become the template for “the emerging ‘hollowed-out’ structure of the contractor state,” the historian Christopher McKenna wrote in The World’s Newest Profession, his 2006 book on the consulting industry.
Over decades, McKinsey’s approach became self-reinforcing. As successive administrations chipped away at the civil service, politicians who advocate small government got the dysfunctional bureaucracy they had complained about all along, which helped them justify dismantling it further.
The upshot of this process can be seen throughout McKinsey’s coronavirus consulting. Stone, the VA health system head, thought a consulting firm made the VA better prepared. The Defense Health Agency provided “no staff support” for the head of its COVID-19 task force, according to a contracting document, prompting the agency to outsource that work to McKinsey. A senior official in Miami-Dade County had a more jaundiced view. She wrote in an email to a colleague that the firm’s consultants were merely “doing the research I am too burned out at this point to do”—adding that she was “quite flattered” that it took an entire team of high-priced consultants to replace her.
McKinsey’s business model also generates a second round of revenue from its government work: The firm effectively sells data it obtains from one government project to other agencies. McKinsey generally retains in its central databases anonymized work product from its engagements, so future consulting teams can get a head start on similar projects. Ordinarily, the federal government might be expected to put together that type of clearinghouse and share it with state and city governments free of charge. But in the absence of such a clearinghouse, McKinsey has something state, city and federal government agencies need, and access to government data has formed a core part of McKinsey’s COVID-19 pitch.
McKinsey’s data was one of the factors cited by VA officials to justify hiring the firm within 24 hours. As a contracting document explained: The firm “already possessed an immense amount of both global and community epidemiological data on COVID-19” the VA didn’t otherwise have access to. McKinsey customers pay not only in cash but by adding new data that the firm will be able to sell to the next customer.
Hiring McKinsey is a famously expensive proposition, even when compared with its leading competitors. A single junior consultant—typically a recent college or business school graduate—runs clients $67,500 per week, or $3.5 million annually. For $160,000 per week, you get two consultants, the second one mid-level.
To alleviate the sticker shock, McKinsey has lately offered a coronavirus discount. In project proposals, the firm branded these COVID-19 rates “philanthropic prices.” The reduced rates ranged from $125,000 per week (for the two-consultant package) to $178,000 (for five). In a separate column, a McKinsey pricing sheet played up pandemic-only add-ons, whose language read like action-figure packaging: “COVID team includes COVID analytics and best practices.”
In her statement, Hilton Segal, the McKinsey partner, noted that, when the pandemic began, the firm reduced its fees to the public sector “as part of our commitment to help. We made our intellectual property and capabilities available widely, including by setting up a COVID Response Center that provides free public access to insights from our research. Thousands of McKinsey colleagues stepped up to help—through client work, pro bono service, developing and publishing insights on the pandemic, and more.”
The firm’s work for Miami-Dade County suggests some clients get little in return, according to interviews, as well as emails and project documents obtained by ProPublica through a public records request. On a Friday in late April, Jennifer Moon received an email from a senior McKinsey partner. Moon is the budget director and a deputy mayor for Miami-Dade, and her boss, the mayor, wanted to hire McKinsey to help finalize guidelines for reopening the county’s economy, which he had shuttered over a month earlier. It fell to Moon to hammer out the details.
In his email, the McKinsey partner, Andre Dua, directed Moon’s attention to a pricing sheet listing what he called “our special Covid 19 pricing” and outlined the anticipated scope of the firm’s work. The proposal consisted largely of consulting buzzwords: variations on the word “analysis”; offers of “best practices,” “perspectives” and “decision-support.”
Moon could read between the lines, and she discerned a familiar set of tasks. “Here’s what the consultants will be doing,” she wrote, forwarding one of Dua’s emails to the county lawyer reviewing McKinsey’s contract. “Apparently, it takes 5 people with staff support to do what I’ve been doing myself.” The $142,000 per week it would cost was more than the combined annual salaries of the two staffers who had been helping Moon prepare the reopening plan—very ably, she noted in an email.
The reopening plan’s publication was imminent, and Moon didn’t expect the project to last longer than a month. But as contract negotiations unfolded, Dua and Geoff Bradford, a McKinsey contract manager, resisted the county’s attempts to limit the contract’s duration to four weeks. They wanted to keep the agreement as open-ended as possible to “provide flexibility.” What they meant by that, they explained in a series of emails, was the flexibility to expand the scope of the project and keep McKinsey’s consultants around longer.
Dua and Bradford also resisted county officials’ efforts to be transparent. McKinsey has a long-standing policy of refusing to reveal the names of its clients and demanding that clients likewise not reveal that they’ve retained McKinsey, unless they’re legally obligated to. Amid the pandemic, the firm has taken confidentiality a step further. McKinsey’s COVID-19 contracts still require that clients not disclose that they’ve hired the consultancy. But many of them now allow McKinsey to unilaterally “disclose that we have been retained by the Client and a general description of the Services.” The firm has taken advantage of that clause to market its government work online.
When the officials in Miami-Dade objected to the confidentiality clause, Dua took a firm line: removing it “will be a show stopper on our end.” Eventually Bradford allowed that the firm might budge, but only a little. McKinsey would consider letting county officials share its work product “with specific entities,” he wrote in a markup of McKinsey’s draft contract. But only “if we’re able to define those entities and can attach guardrails to such disclosure.” McKinsey insisted, in other words, that it should decide what the government could say—and to whom—about the advice it had been given.
As the project progressed, Moon’s initial skepticism was borne out. There were non-intuitive and innovative recommendations among the “best practices” for reopening the county. But many of them were obvious or had already been suggested by county staffers: “install Plexiglass barriers between cashier and customer,” for example. At times, it seemed as if the consultants were picking best practices at random: a slide on reopening construction sites recommended grouping workers into teams that not only work and eat together but “live” and “travel” together.
Myriam Marquez, communications director of the mayor of Miami-Dade County, didn’t respond to a request for comment. McKinsey’s statement noted that the firm’s “work with Miami-Dade County was focused on sharing insights and observed practices from governments and businesses around the world, as leaders navigated the uncertainty of reopening major sectors of their economy.”
In mid-May, Miami-Dade County issued its reopening plan, “The New Normal.” The document, which stretched to 175 pages, was widely panned for its needless complexity, which sowed confusion among the public. The plan structured reopening around two overlapping schemes. Five different colored “flags” represented different phases of reopening. Separately, five “archetypes”—a McKinsey innovation, emails and project documents show—grouped industry sectors and public spaces by how much human interaction they required: “can be performed remotely,” “lower proximity” and so on. Yet the five flags and the five archetypes didn’t align; one flag might cover two archetypes and vice versa. Imagine a stoplight where shapes have been added to the usual three-color scheme—a yellow square means something different from a yellow circle, which means something different from a red circle—and you’ll start to get a sense for the confusion the systems provoked. As the Miami Herald put it, echoing the local reaction in Florida-appropriate terms: “They’re just like the flags that lifeguards fly on their stands at the beach. Except more confusing.”
Xavier Suarez, a longtime county commissioner and former mayor of Miami, didn’t see what had been gained by pulling more than half a million dollars out of the county’s pandemic-hit budget to hire McKinsey. “It just strikes me as a colossal waste of money,” he told me. The firm’s “archetypes” certainly hadn’t added anything. “I remember reading about archetypes in psychology when we covered Carl Jung,” Suarez said. “It sounds like just the right kind of”—and here he paused for effect—“sesquipedalian word a consultant would come up with to try and sound smarter than you.”
Carlos Giménez, the mayor of Miami-Dade County and a political foe of Suarez, evidently came to agree. On June 19, his administration quietly posted a revised version of it. Notably scrubbed from the new “New Normal”: McKinsey’s archetypes. As of mid-July, COVID-19 cases continued to rise in Miami-Dade.


motherjones--2020-07-22--The Border Patrol Is the Last Thing We Need in American Cities Right Now

Over the past week , hundreds of federal law enforcement officers descended upon the police reform protests in Portland , beating demonstrators with batons , pepper-spraying them , shooting non-lethal bullets at them , and even dragging them into unmarked vans .
As my colleagues have reported , the undertrained and sometimes unidentified agents came from several branches of the Department of Homeland Security .
While DHS has not provided a breakdown of how each of its agencies is represented on the ground , the feds say a June 26 executive order signed by President Donald Trump to “ protect @ @ @ @ @ @ @ criminal violence ” gives them the authority to do as they please in America ’ s cities—even if mayors or governors don ’ t want them there .
That ’ s particularly concerning given the involvement of the largest—and in many ways least accountable—law enforcement agency in the country : the US Border Patrol .
According to Andrea R. Flores , the deputy director of immigration policy at the American Civil Liberties Union , the Border Patrol ’ s 20,000 agents have “ a long and troubling history of acting with impunity ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 100 miles from any land or sea border .
They often work in remote areas , alone and without body cameras , tracking drug smugglers and dealing with an incredibly vulnerable group of people that the agency still refers to as “ aliens.
” While there are abuses in all levels of law enforcement , an internal investigation at DHS found in 2015 that “ arrests for corruption of CBP personnel far exceed , on a per capita basis , such arrests at other federal law enforcement agencies.
” Border Patrol agents have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , domestic violence , sexual assault , and sex crimes against children , among a long list of offenses included in a 2018 CBP discipline analysis report .
In one extreme case from 2014 , a Border Patrol agent kidnapped and raped two Honduran girls and their mother .
Agents have run over migrants with their vehicles , fired at them as they ’ ve run away , and even shot into Mexico ; in 2012 , for example , 16-year-old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez was killed on a sidewalk in his hometown @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Border Patrol agent who fired multiple times from the US side of the border fence .
( The ACLU ’ s Flores notes that since 2010 , Border Patrol agents have killed six people , including three children , by shooting across the border into Mexico .
At least 102 people have died as a result of encounters with Border Patrol in the last decade , she said . )
Unlike local law enforcement agencies , Border Patrol gives agents more freedom to engage in high-speed chases in border cities , and over @ @ @ @ @ @ @ countless fatal high-speed chases .
On June 25 , a chase in El Paso ended in the deadliest crash in the city ’ s history .
A witness told El Paso Matters that he saw an agent asking a survivor about his immigration status in the middle of the fatal scene .
Agents also have been known to make racist , sexist , and violent remarks about the people they apprehend .
Last year , ProPublica uncovered a secret Facebook group of about 9,500 current and former Border Patrol agents who joked about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Latina members of Congress .
( On Monday , the House Committee on Oversight and Reform released a new document outlining how CBP negotiated a “ last chance ” deal to reduce the punishment of an employee who engaged in misconduct in the secret Facebook group . )
And last year I wrote about two former agents who were selling T-shirts emblazoned with a common Border Patrol slur for immigrants—one that refers to the sound of a flashlight hitting a migrant in the head .
Beyond that , there ’ s the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the years .
Like when Border Patrol agents forced a group of migrants who were smuggling marijuana to take off their clothes and eat the contraband in front of them .
Or the agent who in 2018 made fun of wailing children in a Border Patrol holding cell , telling them to stop crying after they had been separated from their parents .
The ACLU has filed numerous lawsuits against the agency over the years , and last week it sued to get federal law enforcement to stop assaulting peaceful observers and journalists @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the proper training to respond to peaceful protests , ” Flores said , referring also to Immigration and Customs Enforcement .
“ Congress should immediately investigate the authorities under which these federal agents have been deployed and divest funding from DHS for these operations that prioritize the protection of property over people.
” In some ways , the Border Patrol ’ s deployment in Portland , which a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson confirmed to me via email , is the next step in an increasingly close relationship with the White House .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2016 , when the Border Patrol union endorsed Trump , the first time it had ever backed a presidential candidate .
The union said it wanted a candidate “ who is pro-military and values law enforcement , and who is angry for America and NOT subservient to the interests of other nations.
” With Trump , agents reasoned , they would be able to remove the shackles placed on them during eight years of the Obama presidency .
Art del Cueto , vice president of the Border Patrol union , told me something @ @ @ @ @ @ @ He said there was an overall sense of relief for agents once Trump took office—that they could finally do their jobs .
“ When you ’ re putting you life on the line every day [ and ] you just didn ’ t see much backing for DC at the time , it ’ s upsetting—it knocks down your morale , ” he said .
“ Border Patrol agents work in the roughest terrain , assaulted more than anyone else , and it ’ s a very difficult job ” For his part @ @ @ @ @ @ @ way to praise Border Patrol agents as “ incredible heroes ” and “ incredible patriots ” during his time in office .
Five days after his inauguration , he even called for hiring an extra 5,000 Border Patrol agents as part of his border lockdown , but in the end the agency couldn ’ t fill that mandate—leading CBP to remove some recruitment requirements and speed up the hiring process to try to hire more agents .
Even then , the agency struggled to find as many agents as Trump wanted .
For @ @ @ @ @ @ @ agent turned migrant aid volunteer and a frequent critic of the agency , the situation in Portland has brought into sharp relief the myriad problems that have plagued the agency for decades .
In a blog post on Sunday , Budd wrote : You need to remember that these border agents were willing to ban all Muslims even though that is illegal .
They were willing to separate families of asylum seekers , even though that is illegal .
They were willing to hold those families in their processing cells , in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ food , with forty people to one toilet , while children died of dehydration and flu in their custody .
These agents work in a limited Constitutional rights arena .
They are not accustomed to enforcing laws on Americans with Constitutional rights .
They are not peace officers , and they are our nation ’ s most violent federal law enforcement agents .
According to Trump ’ s Monday press conference , Border Patrol and other DHS agents could soon be heading to cities across the country—New York City , Chicago , Baltimore @ @ @ @ @ @ @ This is who Trump has unleashed against Americans , ” Budd wrote .
“ They will follow him to the end , and obey all his illegal orders .
”

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Over the past week, hundreds of federal law enforcement officers descended upon the police-reform protests in Portland, beating demonstrators with batons, pepper-spraying them, shooting nonlethal bullets at them, and even dragging them into unmarked vans. As my colleagues have reported, the undertrained and sometimes unidentified agents came from several branches of the Department of Homeland Security.
While DHS has not provided a breakdown of how each of its agencies is represented on the ground, the feds say a June 26 executive order signed by President Trump to “protect American monuments” and “combat recent criminal violence” gives them the authority to do as they please in America’s cities—even if mayors or governors don’t want them there.
That’s particularly concerning given the involvement of the largest—and in many ways least accountable—law enforcement agency in the country: the US Border Patrol.
According to Andrea R. Flores, the deputy director of immigration policy at the American Civil Liberties Union, the Border Patrol’s 20,000 agents have “a long and troubling history of acting with impunity” in its expansive jurisdiction, which extends 100 miles from any land or sea border. They often work in remote areas, alone and without body cameras, tracking drug smugglers and dealing with an incredibly vulnerable group of people that the agency still refers to as “aliens.”
While there are abuses at all levels of law enforcement, an internal investigation at DHS found in 2015 that “arrests for corruption of CBP personnel far exceed, on a per capita basis, such arrests at other federal law enforcement agencies.”
Border Patrol agents have been arrested for corruption, aggravated assault, domestic violence, sexual assault, and sex crimes against children, among a long list of offenses included in a 2018 CBP discipline analysis report. In one extreme case from 2014, a Border Patrol agent kidnapped and raped two Honduran girls and their mother.
Border Patrol agents have been arrested for corruption, aggravated assault, domestic violence, sexual assault, and sex crimes against children, among a long list of offenses included in a 2018 CBP discipline report.
Agents have run over migrants with their vehicles, fired at them as they’ve run away, and even shot into Mexico; in 2012, for example, 16-year-old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez was killed on a sidewalk in his hometown of Nogales, Mexico, by a Border Patrol agent who fired multiple times from the US side of the border fence. (The ACLU’s Flores notes that since 2010, Border Patrol agents have killed six people, including three children, by shooting across the border into Mexico. At least 102 people have died as a result of encounters with Border Patrol in the last decade, she said.)
Unlike local law enforcement agencies, Border Patrol gives agents more freedom to engage in high-speed chases in border cities, and over the last decade that has resulted in countless fatal high-speed chases. On June 25, a chase in El Paso ended in the deadliest crash in the city’s history. A witness told El Paso Matters that he saw an agent asking a survivor about his immigration status in the middle of the fatal scene.
Agents have also been known to make racist, sexist, and violent remarks about the people they apprehend. Last year, ProPublica uncovered a secret Facebook group of about 9,500 current and former Border Patrol agents who joked about migrant deaths and posted sexually explicit memes of Latina members of Congress. (On Monday, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform released a new document outlining how CBP negotiated a “last chance” deal to reduce the punishment of an employee who engaged in misconduct in the secret Facebook group.) And last year I wrote about two former agents who were selling T-shirts emblazoned with a common Border Patrol slur for immigrants—one that refers to the sound of a flashlight hitting a migrant in the head.
Beyond that, there’s the litany of downright cruel incidents reported over the years. Like when Border Patrol agents forced a group of migrants who were smuggling marijuana to take off their clothes and eat the contraband in front of them. Or the agent who in 2018 made fun of wailing children in a Border Patrol holding cell, telling them to stop crying after they had been separated from their parents.
An internal investigation by DHS found that “arrests for corruption of CBP personnel far exceed, on a per capita basis, such arrests at other federal law enforcement agencies.”
The ACLU has filed numerous lawsuits against the agency over the years, and last week it sued to get federal law enforcement to stop assaulting peaceful observers and journalists. “These immigration enforcement agencies lack the proper training to respond to peaceful protests,” Flores said, referring also to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Congress should immediately investigate the authorities under which these federal agents have been deployed and divest funding from DHS for these operations that prioritize the protection of property over people.”
In some ways, the Border Patrol’s deployment in Portland, which a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson confirmed to me via email, is the next step in an increasingly close relationship with the White House. That tight bond was first cemented in 2016, when the Border Patrol union endorsed Trump, the first time it had ever backed a presidential candidate. The union said it wanted a candidate “who is pro-military and values law enforcement, and who is angry for America and NOT subservient to the interests of other nations.”
With Trump, agents reasoned, they would be able to remove the shackles placed on them during eight years of the Obama presidency. Art del Cueto, vice president of the Border Patrol union, told me something along those lines in early 2017: He said there was an overall sense of relief for agents once Trump took office—that they could finally do their jobs. “When you’re putting your life on the line every day [and] you just didn’t see much backing for DC at the time, it’s upsetting—it knocks down your morale,” he said. “Border Patrol agents work in the roughest terrain, assaulted more than anyone else, and it’s a very difficult job”
The Border Patrol union endorsed Trump in 2016, saying it wanted a candidate “who is pro-military and values law enforcement, and who is angry for America and NOT subservient to the interests of other nations.”
For his part, Trump has gone out of his way to praise Border Patrol agents as “incredible heroes” and “incredible patriots” during his time in office. Five days after his inauguration, he even called for hiring an extra 5,000 Border Patrol agents as part of his border lockdown, but in the end the agency couldn’t fill that mandate—leading CBP to remove some recruitment requirements and speed up the hiring process to try to hire more agents. Even then, the agency struggled to find as many agents as Trump wanted.
For Jenn Budd, a former Border Patrol agent turned migrant-aid volunteer and a frequent critic of the agency, the situation in Portland has brought into sharp relief the myriad problems that have plagued the agency for decades. In a blog post on Sunday, Budd wrote:
You need to remember that these border agents were willing to ban all Muslims even though that is illegal. They were willing to separate families of asylum seekers, even though that is illegal. They were willing to hold those families in their processing cells, in the same clothes for weeks, eating rotten food, with forty people to one toilet, while children died of dehydration and flu in their custody. These agents work in a limited Constitutional rights arena. They are not accustomed to enforcing laws on Americans with Constitutional rights. They are not peace officers, and they are our nation’s most violent federal law enforcement agents.
According to Trump’s Monday press conference, Border Patrol and other DHS agents could soon be heading to cities across the country—New York City, Chicago, Baltimore, and Oakland among them. “This is who Trump has unleashed against Americans,” Budd wrote. “They will follow him to the end, and obey all his illegal orders.”


motherjones--2020-07-22--Lockheed Earned a Profit During the Pandemic. Now Congress Wants It to Pay for Faulty Fighter Jets.

It ’ s been quite a week for Lockheed Martin .
On Tuesday , the financial news outlet Barron ’ s dubbed the giant defense contractor a “ pandemic star , ” after its quarterly earnings came in at $ 1 billion more than analysts predicted .
The company also played a starring role on Capitol Hill—just not the kind that its executives might have hoped for .
At a hearing Wednesday , members of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform blasted Lockheed for raking in huge profits while its signature program , the F-35 fighter plane , remains @ @ @ @ @ @ @ A June 2019 report from the Defense Department ’ s internal watchdog determined that the government had spent $ 303 million on unusable parts provided by Lockheed to fix existing aircraft , one of several ongoing problems with the next-generation jets that had committee members irate .
“ If Lockheed is making so much goddamn money , why are you delivering F-35s with these problems ?
” asked Rep. James Comer ( Ky. ) , the committee ’ s top-ranking Republican .
Greg Ulmer , vice president and general manager for Lockheed ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not specify how much money Lockheed still owed the government in reimbursements for the faulty parts .
And , despite being pressed on the matter by several lawmakers , Ulmer declined to commit to ever paying off that debt .
“ It ’ s a complex problem , ” he said .
“ We continue to negotiate in good faith.
” Faulty parts are just one of the F-35 ’ s problems , which also include its exorbitant cost and ineffective information management system .
As I reported in the fall : Underperformance @ @ @ @ @ @ @ appears to be getting worse .
Nearly every month there appears a slew of reports lambasting some aspect of the program , from Lockheed ’ s data management to cockpit pressure within certain jets that cause “ excruciating ” ear and sinus pain for pilots .
According to the Government Accountability Office , between May and November 2018 , F-35 jets achieved “ full mission capability ” only 26.8 percent of the time ; the Pentagon ’ s minimum acceptable rate is 60 percent .
During this period , “ fleet-wide F-35 aircraft @ @ @ @ @ @ @ US warfighter ’ s requirements , ” a GAO report concluded in April .
Ulmer eventually acknowledged that the fighter ’ s jet information management system , known as ALIS , was “ not meeting our customer or fighter requirement , ” but he maintained that the fighter jet had become less expensive and safer to fly .
Lawmakers from both parties have bought into the F-35 program by mandating that the Pentagon continue to purchase the jets from Lockheed as part of the annual defense policy bill .
( The program ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It generates jobs in at least 46 states , according to Lockheed . )
But their confidence in the program—and Lockheed—seems to be waning .
“ The general tone of the hearing on both sides of the political aisle was stronger than I ’ ve seen in the past , ” Dan Grazier , who has written extensively about the F-35 for the Project on Government Oversight , told me .
“ Twenty years in , frustration with the program has really started to bubble to the surface.
” Lockheed still has long @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , it announced it was replacing the much-derided ALIS with a new , cloud-based system called ODIN .
To many observers , that is a welcome change—even Ulmer admitted that ALIS was an “ antiquated ” system—but it presents cybersecurity vulnerabilities that have not been fully addressed .
Then there ’ s the matter of the electronic logs used to document whether a plane is safe to fly .
Committee chair Rep. Carolyn Maloney ( D-N.Y. ) said that Lockheed is responsible for at least $ 183 million in malfunctioning logs but that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ government a refund .
The project ’ s continuing flaws show “ just how complicated—I would say unnecessarily complicated—the F-35 program is , ” Grazier said .
“ Something as routine as swapping out spare parts in the aircraft can be so problematic that the House oversight committee has to have a hearing .
”

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It’s been quite a week for Lockheed Martin. On Tuesday, the financial news outlet Barron’s dubbed the giant defense contractor a “pandemic star,” after its quarterly earnings came in at $1 billion more than analysts predicted. The company also played a starring role on Capitol Hill—just not the kind that its executives might have hoped for.
At a hearing Wednesday, members of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform blasted Lockheed for raking in huge profits while its signature program, the F-35 fighter plane, remains plagued with delays and safety problems. A June 2019 report from the Defense Department’s internal watchdog determined that the government had spent $303 million on unusable parts provided by Lockheed to fix existing aircraft, one of several ongoing issues with the next-generation jets that had committee members irate.
Greg Ulmer, vice president and general manager for Lockheed’s F-35 Lightning II program, could not specify how much money Lockheed still owed the government in reimbursements for the faulty parts. And, despite being pressed on the matter by several lawmakers, Ulmer declined to commit to ever paying off that full debt. “It’s a complex problem,” he said. “We continue to negotiate in good faith.”
Faulty parts are just one of the F-35’s problems, which also include its exorbitant cost and ineffective information management system. As I reported in the fall:
Underperformance by the F-35 has been bad and appears to be getting worse. Nearly every month there appears a slew of reports lambasting some aspect of the program, from Lockheed’s data management to cockpit pressure within certain jets that cause “excruciating” ear and sinus pain for pilots. According to the Government Accountability Office, between May and November 2018, F-35 jets achieved “full mission capability” only 26.8 percent of the time; the Pentagon’s minimum acceptable rate is 60 percent. During this period, “fleet-wide F-35 aircraft performance did not meet any of the US warfighter’s requirements,” a GAO report concluded in April.
Ulmer eventually acknowledged that the fighter’s jet information management system, known as ALIS, was “not meeting our customer or fighter requirement,” but he maintained that the fighter jet had become less expensive and safer to fly.
Lawmakers from both parties have bought into the F-35 program by mandating that the Pentagon continue to purchase the jets from Lockheed as part of the annual defense policy bill. (The program’s political benefits are widely spread: It generates jobs in at least 46 states, according to Lockheed.) But their confidence in the program—and Lockheed—seems to be waning. “The general tone of the hearing on both sides of the political aisle was stronger than I’ve seen in the past,” Dan Grazier, who has written extensively about the F-35 for the Project on Government Oversight, told me. “Twenty years in, frustration with the program has really started to bubble to the surface.”
Lockheed still has long way to go. Earlier this year, it announced it was replacing the much-derided ALIS with a new, cloud-based system called ODIN. To many observers, that is a welcome change—even Ulmer admitted that ALIS was an “antiquated” system—but it presents cybersecurity vulnerabilities that have not been fully addressed. Then there’s the matter of the electronic logs used to document whether a plane is safe to fly. Committee chair Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) said that Lockheed is responsible for at least $183 million in malfunctioning logs but that it has not agreed to provide the government a refund.
The project’s continuing flaws show “just how complicated—I would say unnecessarily complicated—the F-35 program is,” Grazier said. “Something as routine as swapping out spare parts in the aircraft can be so problematic that the House oversight committee has to have a hearing.”
Correction: A previous version of this article inaccurately attributed a quote to Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.).