This entirely misses the forest for the trees. And granted the author's bias gets in the way of his attempt to point out that forest. Their bias aligns with mine, but with less editorialization IMO the following would be more clear:
It's not that the work is or isn't valuable, or where that value is. It's that McKinsey charges 72% more than a competitor for the same consulting, and that there's a massive perverse incentive for public servants in charge of awarding contracts to pick the most expensive one.
From the article, bias left in:
Back in August, I noted that McKinsey’s competitor, the Boston Consulting Group, charges the government $33,063.75/week for the time of a recent college grad to work as a contractor. Not to be outdone, McKinsey’s pricing is much much higher, with one McKinsey “business analyst” - someone with an undergraduate degree and no experience - lent to the government priced out at $56,707/week, or $2,948,764/year.
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And this gets to the second reason why McKinsey can charge so much, which has to do less with McKinsey and more with an incentive to overpay more generally. It’s more likely something called the ‘Industrial Funding Fee,’ or IFF. The GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service gets a cut of whatever certain contractors spend using the GSA’s schedule, and this cut is the IFF. The IFF is priced at .75% of the total amount of a government contract. In the case of McKinsey, since 2006, “FAS has realized $7.2 million in Industrial Funding Fee revenue.”
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Does McKinsey do a good job? The answer is that it’s probably no better or worse than anyone else. I’m sure there are times when McKinsey is quite helpful, but it’s in all probability vastly overpriced for what it is, which is basically a group of smart people who know how to use powerpoint presentations and speak in soothing tones. You can just go through news clippings and find areas McKinsey did cookie cutter nonsense. For instance, McKinsey helped ruin an IT implementation for intelligence services. In the immigration story, MacDougall shows that the consulting firm encouraged ICE to give less food and medical care to detainees. That’s cruelty, not efficiency.