Eric Gay/AP Photo
Immigrants seeking asylum eat in a cafeteria at the ICE South Texas Family Residential Center, in Dilley, Texas, August 23, 2019.
The best depiction of management consultants in popular culture comes from the Bobs in Office Space. They descend upon the nondescript software firm Initech to fire workers in the name of efficiency. They’re just doing their job, poring over the roster of employees and making dispassionate decisions that ruin careers, upend lives, and drive people to robbery and suicide. It’s a comedy.
The best depiction of management consultants in the real world comes from this ProPublica piece on McKinsey, which takes consultant culture to its logical conclusion. First you’re just trying to make things run better, then you’re helping the opioid industry sell more pills to unsuspecting customers, then you’re working for dictators and despots because hey, their money’s green and at least they should operate efficiently, and before long you’re helping ICE free up money to round up and deport more immigrants by cutting back on their food and medical care.
Really, that’s what they did.
McKinsey, Pete Buttigieg’s former employer, got on ICE’s payroll under the Obama administration, assisting with the agency’s “organizational transformation.” When Trump reached power, McKinsey’s mission became a practical one: how to expel millions of immigrants from the country under current budgetary pressures. “Feed them less” became part of the solution; hey, it’s a measurable deliverable. The Bobs at McKinsey also sought to accelerate deportations in ways that violated due process. They focused on the numbers, on solving the problem. Crying children separated from their families wasn’t part of the PowerPoint.
This ICE contract, worth $20 million to McKinsey, ended in 2018. But after the fact, managing partner Kevin Sneader lied to his own staff about the immigration work the firm did. He couldn’t justify treating immigrants as widgets to be squeezed on food and medical care, but he could justify taking the $20 million and sleeping at night.
Consultant culture is one of the great banes of modern society. By seeing the world as a math problem, they’ve engineered compassion and decency out of the equation. They’ve devolved the most unsavory plans into wonk-speak, spinning malevolence into common sense, evil into banality. I’m sure McKinseyites go through 80 self-justifications a day that they just follow orders and optimize outcomes. They’re all wrong. They own this horror.
LINKS TO MY STORIES
We need your help at the Prospect. Journalism needs your help. I explain why.
The ridiculous D.C. invite of the week: Wells Fargo sponsors an affordable-housing panel.
TODAY AT THE PROSPECT
Rachel Cohen on water justice in Baltimore.
Sarah Jaffe with a terrific piece on Labour’s ground game in the U.K. elections.
Max Moran on Bloomberg Opinion laundering pro-monopoly research.
APPEARANCES
I was on Rising on Hill.TV discussing Barack Obama and the 2020 election. Watch here.
I was on MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes talking about the deliberations over the new NAFTA agreement. Watch here.
SHARING THE WEALTH
Hundreds of thousands of food stamp recipients likely to lose benefits from a Trump administration rule to tighten eligibility. (Wall Street Journal)
China’s surging carbon emissions are a threat to the planet. (The Week)
Alexa’s Cyber Monday recommendations just coincidentally happen to be Amazon products. (Vox)
Bernie Sanders’s heterodox foreign-policy team has transformed the 2020 race for the better. (Politico)
We’ve come to accept the routine lawbreaking of wealthy tax dodgers. (NYMag)
Mike Bloomberg’s misogyny translated over to his business. (Business Insider)
Duncan Hunter pleads guilty to campaign fund embezzlement. (NY Times)
The Mexican business community wants no part of the labor enforcement rules House Democrats are seeking in the new NAFTA. (Wall Street Journal)
