Buttigieg Says McKinsey Clients Included Blue Cross, Best Buy
Buttigieg Says McKinsey Clients Included Blue Cross, Best Buy
(Bloomberg) -- Pete Buttigieg on Tuesday released the names of clients that he worked for as a consultant at McKinsey & Co., a list that includes Blue Cross Blue Shield Michigan, the U.S. Postal Service and the Department of Defense.
Buttigieg, who has risen to the top tier of candidates in the Democratic primary, had come under fire from Democratic rivals, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, for not giving voters a full picture of his private sector experience. He made public the names one day after the firm released him from a nondisclosure agreement.
In his three years at the firm from 2007 to 2010, Buttigieg also worked for Loblaw Cos., the Canadian grocer, as well as Best Buy Co., the National Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy and the Energy Foundation.
“Now, voters can see for themselves that my work amounted to mostly research and analysis,” Buttigieg said in a statement. “They can also see that I value both transparency and keeping my word. Neither of these qualities are something we see coming out of Washington, especially from this White House. It’s time for that to change.”
The detailed information about his time at McKinsey also comes as Buttigieg has opened up his private fundraisers to the press, a response to Warren and other Democratic candidates who had criticized his practice of keeping the events closed. Warren doesn’t hold fundraisers and relies mostly on grassroots contributions.
At Blue Cross Blue Shield in 2007, Buttigieg worked for three months on a team focused on overhead expenditures and the project did not involve policies, premiums or benefits, according to the campaign. His work at Loblaw’s in Toronto in 2008 centered on the effects of price cuts. At Best Buy in Chicago in 2008, he focused on opportunities to sell more energy-efficient home products in stores.
In 2008-2009, he worked for the Natural Resources Defense Council and energy-related government departments and nonprofits to research ways to combat climate change through energy efficiency. The work culminated in a published report, titled, “Unlocking Energy Efficiency in the U.S. Economy.”
In 2009, he worked at the Energy Foundation in California and researched renewable energy. He then worked at the Department of Defense, focusing on increasing employment and entrepreneurship in Iraq and Afghanistan. As part of that work, he was based in Washington but traveled to both of those countries. His last project was for the Postal Service, based in Washington, where he worked on finding new sources of revenue.
In his statement, Buttigieg also took aim at critics of his private-sector work, saying the attacks on him have pulled away focus on issues such as gun violence and health care.
“At the same time, I am also concerned about efforts to demonize and disqualify people who have worked in the private sector for the sake of political purity,” he said. “The majority of Americans have worked in the private sector at some point in their life. Good public servants - including recent Democratic presidents - have worked in the private sector at some point in their lives.”
Warren demanded that he release his McKinsey client list as the consulting firm was criticized, including by Buttigieg himself, for its work on opioids and migrant detention.
“As somebody who left the firm a decade ago, seeing what certain people in that firm have decided to do is extremely frustrating and extremely disappointing,” Buttigieg told reporters last week.
Buttigieg has criticized Warren for failing to release her tax returns covering the years she did work as a bankruptcy lawyer.
On Sunday, Warren disclosed that she had made $1.9 million as a bankruptcy lawyer. She had previously released the names of the clients and cases she took on during her tenure as a professor at Harvard and other law schools, as well as 11 years of tax returns, back to 2008. The documents released Sunday cover her compensation between 1985 and 2009, but don’t include tax returns.
(Michael Bloomberg is also seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)
To contact the reporter on this story: Tyler Pager in Washington at tpager1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, John Harney, Max Berley
©2019 Bloomberg L.P.